Article: 76028 of comp.arch From: mash@mash.engr.sgi.com (John R. Mashey) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Impact of Flatscreen Displays and CRT death on comp.arch Date: 11 Jan 1999 19:04:47 GMT Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Lines: 53 Message-ID: <77di0f$btc$1@murrow.corp.sgi.com> References: <369685C1.6B6F3E31@cs.wisc.edu> In article , scott@nospam.doubleu.com (Scott Hess) writes: |> The SGI display is much better in this area. There didn't appear to |> But it runs something like $2800, including video card (including card |> because it's all-digital. It's a #9 card, I believe). That's |> competitive against, say, getting a pair of 1024x768 panels. But it's |> not very competitive against a 19" or 21" CRT. I do a talk in which many technologies are plotted on semi-log-scale charts, with the vertical axis performance/capacity/bandwidth, plotted versus year. If two technologies are plotted on the same chart, and they are improving in parallel, they tend to get used the same way, with the same tradeoffs. If the ratio is changing, then the tradeoffs keep changing. Example: Hennessy & Patterson, 1st edition, had a problem where one was asked to calculate the year when one would throw away disks in favor of DRAM, since the former was increasing in density at ~2X/3 years, and the latter at 4X/3 years, both at approximately-cosntant price. Then, disks accelerated to 4X/3 years, and the problem disappeared from H&P's second edition. CRTs have been around a long time: does anybody have a table they can post, over last 10 years, of some kind of normalized price for each of several size/resolution combinations? My sense is that prices haven't been coming down all that fast, especially for larger monitors. (?) Good LCDs are fairly new; I used to check out overhead displays at every trade show, and was usually disappointed. I rememember how excited everybody was, ~late 1993, when we had the earliest Indy Presenter flat panels (1024x768), but they were only avaialble in tiny handfuls from the display vendors. (Everybody was excited, because the earlier panels were OK for static graphics, but fairly useless for motion, and these were actually OK, finally). The moral of all this: (a) Big flat panels are still expensive. (b) But, they are moving fast, and things are now available at reasonable (if not cheap) prices that weren't available in any reasonable form just a year ago. (c) Hence, without knowing anything about the pricing on this specific product, on general technology grounds, anybody would expect that the current price is for a brand-new, premium product in its earliest phases, and that the prices of such products will come down. (d) What is certainly true is that we are now actually starting to get LCDs with display size, persistence, color characteristics that make them reasonable to do serious graphics with, which was just not true at all not very long ago. -- -john mashey DISCLAIMER: EMAIL: mash@sgi.com DDD: 650-933-3090 FAX: 650-933-4392 USPS: Silicon Graphics/Cray Research 40U-005, 2011 N. Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View, CA 94043-1389