We asked quite a few Nvidia people why Fermi got delayed and each time we hit a wall. Nvidia's PR department didn't want to talk about what went wrong on the chip.

The only answer we ever got was that Fermi is the most complex chip that Nvidia ever made and that it takes huge amount of engineering to get such a complex chip out in the field. You need to read between the lines, a lot.

One can only imagine that some parts of the chip didn't work in A1 silicon, as it took Nvidia all the way to A3 to prepare it for launch. The launch should happen on the 26 in USA and 27th March in Europe, but we are not sure about the availability as we expect it to sell-out at the launch day.

We will try to dig out what went wrong, but obviously some part of chip didn’t work we only need to find out which one. The glitch was big enough to delay the launch for some six months.

This all remind us of ATI's R600 delay, when the card had problems with getting over 500MHz due to the faulty third party IP.