During the company’s quarterly conference call, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang admitted to analysts that the company would not begin ramping shipments of their Fermi GPU until Q1 of the 2010 calendar year.

“Next year it is going to be an interesting first quarter because, in fact, we will need more wafers than ever in Q1. The reason for that is because–and I mean more 40nm wafers than ever in Q1–we are […] fully ramping Fermi for three different product lines: GeForce, Quadro and Tesla,” said Huang.

Huang’s Q1 statement refers to the company’s fiscal year which runs from January 26 until January 25 of the following year. NVIDIA’s schedule is approximately one year ahead of the calendar year, so the period of 26 January, 2010 until 26 April, 2010 represents the company’s first quarter in fiscal year 2011. This window also happens to be the same timeline we predicted on Wednesday for Fermi’s official debut.

The announcements came as part of an overall strong showing from NVIDIA in the company’s third quarter. The company posted a 16% increase in QOQ revenue to $903.2 million, while YOY standings rose slightly from $897.7 million at this time last year. Year over year, the company’s GAAP net income rose from $61.7 million to $107.6 million.

“We continued to make progress in the third quarter with healthy market demand across the board. Revenue was up from a year ago, with improvement in each of our PC, professional solutions and consumer businesses,” Huang said. “It’s great to see us shipping orders with our Tegra mobile-computing solution, and growing enthusiasm for our Tesla platform for parallel computing in the server and cloud-computing markets.”