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From: positron@cosmic.berkeley.edu (Shigeki Misawa)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: OS cost component of workstation
Summary: Cheap Large Color Monitors?
Message-ID: <1990Nov9.094002.22536@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 9 Nov 90 09:40:02 GMT
References: <2840@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Nov6.222057.17797@ico.isc.com>, <2855@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <8bC=xse00VpgQb9lNc@andrew.cmu.edu>
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Reply-To: positron@cosmic.berkeley.edu (Shigeki Misawa)
Organization: UCB Physics Department
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In-Reply-To: mh2f+@andrew.cmu.edu (Mark Hahn)


In Message-ID: <8bC=xse00VpgQb9lNc@andrew.cmu.edu> Mark Hahn says :

>there is hope in the future for using commodity parts
>for cheapix, but it's not here now.  pervious posts have
>identified a major weak point in the plan: monitor and 
>graphics adapter.  there are some bits of news in the press
>about a new IBM standard called XGA, which is, 
>as I recall, 1024x768 in color.  it seems reasonable to expect 
>the same painful bank-selecting interface as VGA,
>but hopefully not the same slow initial implementation.
>if you buy the argument that volume makes for cheap prices,
>you'll want to wait for XGA to become a commodity.

Which gets to an interesting question, how much does it really cost
to manufacture a large color monitor and graphics card? an how
much more is this over the price of your run of the mill color
monitor. In one of the recent computer rags (I forget which one,
PC Week, Computer World, Digital Review?), there was a quote from
a spokesman from one of the Taiwanese SPARC clone makers (I think
it was Tatung) saying that large color monitors are not significantly
more expensive to make than your run of the mill monitor and that
the reason why the price is high is that the workstation market is
willing to pay the extra buck for it.


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Shigeki Misawa UCB Physics Department