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To: Bilow who wrote (45642)	6/1/1998 2:42:00 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Carl Your are stating the obvious about the "build it yourself" market. It's obvious you have never built a PC either. Let us build this hypothetical barely functional PC from the absolute cheapest parts offered at the 168 club website. Monitor 14" 129.88 2.1G HD 119.88 Motherboard 78.88 Cyrix 686 CPU 66.88 CDROM 48.88 32Meg DIMM 42.88 33.3 Modem 35.88 Case/PS 20.88 Floppy 17.88 Keyboard 12.88 Mouse 9.88 Video card 21.88 Windows 95 79.88 Sound card 13.88 Speakers 8.88 $ 709.20 Shipping ??? Warranty... Forget it Rest assured you will recieve some of the wrong parts, missing parts, incompatible parts, poor documentation. You will have to send some things back for the proper replacement parts. On the phone, high levels of frustration... and you havent started to assemble the thing yet. $710 for the cheapest of the cheap on their website no less. I bet thos $8 speakers sound great. These prices have been around since the 386 days. You can always build your own bare bones with cheap feature poor trailing edge technology stuff. Are you suggesting the consumer market will move to do it yourselfers? No way. That's only for folks like me... a scant few in the big picture. A keyboard, floppy, case/PS do not make up a PC.. They are the cheapest components. no wonder you use them as examples. Newer parts, such as 24x CD roms, and 2.1G hard drives are more expensive. But these parts will drop in price just like the others. Yes because they wont be as attractive when 18G HD's and R/W DVD's are the norm. You'll see them at swap meets or in museums. Convienient how you gloss over the real cost adders of a PC. Add memory, CPU, monitor etc... this is where the cost is... not keyboards, floppys and mice where innovation has all but ceased thus making them more commodity like. "Metal and motors" is just a surrogate term for the mass amount of physical stuff in a PC that can't be produced much cheaper brand new. You may wish to believe that innovation will stop and therefore PC prices will move in a linear downward trajectory. But there is almost a decade of data suggesting that trying to assemble a PC from the cheapest parts available still costs about the same and gives you the same relative performance delta from leading edge offerings. What will continue to happen is that you will be able to get more and more power at these price points but it will always be relatively less than the leading edge. It's all relative... To be sure, I built my first home system for $650 mail order. It was a 286 8MHZ, 20Meg HD etc. I paid exactly $129 for the monitor... a monochrome. I would say the price points have not really dropped, what you get for the price has increased however. There is a definite limitation to how low a basic PC can go. I agree with Mr. Gwenapp that alternative computing devices, more "fixed function" if you will (set top boxes and the like), are going to cut in at the low end. Continued advancements in hardware and software will keep the basic PC platform at a relatively stable price point. Anyway, the trend now is away from silicon integration. I see this now in the next generation PC's I'm designing. More ASICS, not less... wonder why that is?? This excerp from the Slater report Six or seven years ago, when it became apparent that the capability to put several million transistors on a chip was just around the corner, many industry observers (myself included) confidently predicted that PCs would soon be reduced to a single chip plus memory. Even Intel gave presentations that forecast this outcome, and its 386SL and 486SL processors looked like steps in this direction. Chips and Technologies, VLSI Technology, AMD, and Vadem all introduced high-integration PC products. As expected, transistor counts grew--but the anticipated integration path stopped short. The extra transistors have been used for faster CPU cores and larger caches, not for on-chip system logic or peripherals. All the announced high-integration products either failed entirely or were limited to non-PC niches. Texas Instruments developed a highly integrated design based on a Cyrix core but killed the product before it came to market. AMD designed a 486 chip with an integrated PCI interface but didn't put it into production. Today, there is one highly integrated processor in the PC market: Cyrix's MediaGX. (SGS-Thomson is marketing a highly integrated processor based on Cyrix's earlier 486 core, but it is too slow for even the entry-level PC market.) National, in explaining its reasons for acquiring Cyrix has focused on the fact that the company now has all the building blocks for a complete PC. National plans to integrate more functions in future descendants of the MediaGX. Given the dismal track record of the PC-on-a-chip concept, is there reason to believe National may do better? Clearly, a single-chip PC can be built--but should it? Since a high-integration design must start with a proven CPU core and peripherals, it is hard for it to be less than a year--and generally more like two years--behind the leading edge. During the time it takes to design, debug, and bring into production an integrated chip, changes can occur in the system architecture (such as the emergence of PCI, which left the 486SL with the wrong bus structure) or in the input/output system--as is apparent in the MediaGX, which lacks support for USB, 3D graphics, and video. MEATHEAD