new macs, part 2

[isus]

here's the recent rumor:
ibm has gotten 90nm g5's going, at speeds of 2, 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6ghz. it is widely thought that apple will release dual 2.6ghz power mac's, with 533mhz ddr2 and 2 1.5ghz system buses in january.

by then apple might have gotten the 30" cinema displays (lcd's)...

for all cpu's, this is the biggest mhz jump ever (2ghz -> 2.6ghz)

[freeloaders]

wow 30" cinema ?
now i can sit on my futon and surf the web at the same time.

[d-koolest]

Why is there a limit to the size of displays? Does it just cost too much to be worth getting a huge one, of is there some technical bottleneck?

[isus]

well crt's are out of the question due to the weight that would be necessary to have a 30"... and a lcd uses real pixels... each little dot on the screen requires another itsy-bitsy transistor to control it. considering that apple's 23" has a 1920x1200 resolution, that translates into 2.3 million pixels. it takes some serious gpu horsepower to render a screen that size, not considering many consumer gpu's top out at 2048x1536.

doing a little math here:
the 23 has 1920x1200
the 20 has 1680x1050
so for every 3 inches, you gain 240x150.
for a 30 inch, that would be 560x350 for the 7" gain.
add that to the 23": 2480x1550.
in individual pixels, that's 3.84 million.

how apple is gonna get that to work on the current gpu's, i'm not sure... maybe they will be giant sized 1920x1200's?

[isus]

oh, and don't forget cost... my 19" cost $650... it's nice, but it's not so nice as to be widescreen, adc and dvi capable, and etc... so a 20" costs $1399 and the 23" costs $2000... that's $700 per 3"... the increase alone for the 30" would be $1633, so the total would end up being over $3500!

i would just get two 20" if that was the case :-P

note: all prices are done WITHOUT adc discounts.