Despite all the hype over the reveal of the new NVIDIA Fermi based video cards earlier this week at the GTC 2009 conference, it would appear NVIDIA is even further behind in production of their next gen technology than originally anticipated. So far behind in fact, that CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was forced to go onstage and proudly display a dummy card.

Yes, that’s right, as it stands Fermi based video cards are just a hunk of PCB, plastic and metal; a very nice looking, futuristic paperweight. NVIDIA reps confirmed the phony news with Hardware Canucks this morning after some speculation around the web regarding the prototype’s legitimacy due to the lack of soldering points and pins on the back of the card, along with various  alignment issues, blocked off venting so one couldn’t see inside the cooler and the use of common household screws to hold it all together.

It’s far from a scandal; the card’s physical appearance when released (at least the Tesla model) is very likely to mimic what was shown onstage, but it does serve to prove just how far away we are from seeing these cards on store shelves. Earlier this week, rumour speculated that consumers may be seeing the first of the cards in late November 2009, but in light of this fake card announcement, that seems all but impossible. Original estimates of a 2010 first or second quarter debut for the technology is far more likely.

NVIDIA does however insist that the live Fermi demo’s viewed at the conference were run using the Fermi cards, they were just to ugly to publicly showcase. They may be around in some fashion, we just haven’t really seen them….yet

A few features have finally be put to the blank face that has only been known as the GT300. A few key details of the upcoming NVIDIA generation of video cards have been leaked, the first of which is a name. Codenamed Fermi, after the developer of the first nuclear power reactor, Enrico Fermi,  it appears to be quite suiting when looking at the rumoured specs.

Sources say that the card will be build on the 40nm manufacturing process and  feature 3 billion transistors, a 384-bit memory interface running on approximately 1.5GB  (3GB and 6GB versions also rumoured)  of GDDR5 memory. Taking GPU computing in a new direction, NVIDIA is redeveloping  ”shader cores” into CUDA cores, of which the card will feature 512. There are 32 of CUDA cores packed into each of the described “Shader Clusters” for a total of 16 clusters. The beauty of this new design is that these clusters are able to operate independently and balance load on calculations.

In another unique approach, they have added 1MB of L1 Cache onto the card, and divided it into 16KB chunks along with 786KB of unified L2 cache. NVIDIA is clearly pushing to embrace the video card as the new power house of the computer, and develop its parallel computing technology in mainstream video cards while still maintaining dominance in the visual graphics.

The icing on the cake is the native language and API support for CUDA (C), C++, Fortran,  DirectCompute 11, DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL.

NVIDIA’s GTC conference is being held today, and we look forward to updating you later in the day as we hear more. It is rumoured that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will be debuting a working model of the GT300 during his keynote.

For more technical details on the GT300 visit the Bright Side of News