EEVblog #1215 - $18,000 4K Monitor Teardown From 2001

[EEVblog]

The IBM T221 was the world's first 4k monitor. Released in 2001, it was 12 years ahead of the first consumer 4k monitors,
It innovated dual domain IPS LCD display technology.
Teardown time!

[johnlsenchak]

[NiHaoMike]

It's also interesting to note that a well tuned 1080p to 4K upscaler uses about 1 TFLOPS of compute power. Back in 2000, it would cost almost a million dollars of supercomputer hardware to make that happen. We sure take modern GPUs for granted! (In late 2014, when I upgraded to 4K, the display was about $450 and the GPU about $300.)

If we assume a 4K to 8K upscaler would use the same processing power per pixel, that would be about 4 TFLOPS, which (in theory) could be met with a $300 GPU nowadays. GPU technology has advanced faster than display technology did, and I predict that once 8K displays become affordable to the average consumer, the upscalers would be using machine learning to make good use of the extra GPU.

[EEVblog]

Wow, I thought my video was long

[chickenHeadKnob]

I remember when these were announced. I wanted one bad. If I recall correctly the main market being addressed was medical imaging. It is hard to get the resolution of a standard x-ray without film. But film processing  cost and slow turnaround time for developing adds up so the high cost of the monitors could still have a quick pay back time.

[tineibous]

Hey Dave, you asked if there's others monitors that needed more than one input to work at full speed.

Take a look at this video from Linus Tech Tips:

At 2:40 he shows that the early versions of 8k and 4k monitors needed more than one input to work @60fps

[EEVblog]

At 2:40 he shows that the early versions of 8k and 4k monitors needed more than one input to work @60fps

Yep, a few people have pointed that out. Clearly I'm not a gamer 

[ericloewe]

Early consumer 4K displays also had similar connection limitations. Some/all early models even had two separate controllers because 4K display controllers weren't available yet (at least economically).
By then, much of the complexity inherent in those setups was obfuscated away by using DisplayPort 1.2, which supports MST (several streams for independent monitors through one connection), allowing for a single cable to a standard interface with a minimum of driver trickery.


Edit: Details on an example from 2013: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7157/asus-pq321q-ultrahd-4k-monitor-review/2
Using HDMI 1.4 limited the display to 4k@30 Hz, same for DisplayPort without MST enabled, with MST the panel gets divided in two and allows for 60 Hz.

[aqarwaen]

i wonder what kind pc built you needed to run 4k in 2001 and was there even any games what had 4k resolution option?

[NiHaoMike]

i wonder what kind pc built you needed to run 4k in 2001 and was there even any games what had 4k resolution option?

Probably multiple PCs, commonly done for building elaborate flight simulators back then. (Nowadays, it's more common to just add extra GPUs.)

[Razor512]

Why do companies that make FPGAs like to price gouge so much?
They would sell a lot more if they were to charge a more reasonable price, like $100.
They are effectively creating their own issues and starting a price gouging cycle. They may charge a lot because they do not have enough customers, but the reason they do not have enough customers is because they are charging too much.

It is like those smaller stores that go out of business, they enter a cycle that drives them out of business as they see the number of customers dwindling and to compensate, they charge the remaining customers more to make up for the lack of customers, which ultimately causes more customers to leave.

[Gary350z]

When making that main board, how do you reflow it, since both sides of the PCB have lots of parts? In other words, what keeps the parts on the bottom side from falling off during reflow?

[NiHaoMike]

Lower cost FPGAs are available, the bigger ones will stay expensive because they're expensive to make.

[Zbig]

Always wanted to ask that: what's the origin of the "come-a-gutsa" saying? What does it mean, exactly? How to spell it properly? Is it a "Dave'ism" or is it one of these funny Australian things to say? It's so hilarious I lose it every time I hear Dave say that. I just have to know!

[tchicago]

Always wanted to ask that: what's the origin of the "come-a-gutsa" saying? What does it mean, exactly? How to spell it properly? Is it a "Dave'ism" or is it one of these funny Australian things to say? It's so hilarious I lose it every time I hear Dave say that. I just have to know!

Yeah, and what's that "spared no expense" film?

[mariush]

Yeah, and what's that "spared no expense" film?

Jurassic Park 1993: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/

[tszaboo]

Why do companies that make FPGAs like to price gouge so much?
They would sell a lot more if they were to charge a more reasonable price, like $100.
They are effectively creating their own issues and starting a price gouging cycle. They may charge a lot because they do not have enough customers, but the reason they do not have enough customers is because they are charging too much.

It is like those smaller stores that go out of business, they enter a cycle that drives them out of business as they see the number of customers dwindling and to compensate, they charge the remaining customers more to make up for the lack of customers, which ultimately causes more customers to leave.

OK, so let's take a high end FPGA of today:

"Xilinx’s ACAP portfolio will be initiated with TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process, with the first tapeouts due in late 2018. Xilinx states that Project Everest has been a monumental internal effort, taking 4-5 years and 1500 engineers already, with over $1b in R&D costs. The final big chips are expected to weigh in at 50 billion
transistors, with a mix of monolithic and interposer designs based on configurations."

BTW a 28 core Xeon has 8 billion transistors. So this is 6 times as large, lot less yield, smaller market, interfaces that regular computers only can dream of. That's why it is expensive.

When making that main board, how do you reflow it, since both sides of the PCB have lots of parts? In other words, what keeps the parts on the bottom side from falling off during reflow?

Surface tension and glue.

i wonder what kind pc built you needed to run 4k in 2001 and was there even any games what had 4k resolution option?

I dont think it was impossible to drive this. I remember having 1600x1200 CRT monitors back in 2000, and this is just 4x the pixels. In 2001, there was for example the Matrox Parhelia 256MB, which was with freaking 256MB of memory (I had 1.2GB HDD back then) which had:
Maximum resolutions (per display) Digital, 1-2 monitors: 1920 x 1200
Joined graphics card mode enables an additional Matrox DualHead** or TripleHead† graphics solution to work in tandem in one system to drive up to four displays‡
DVI x 2

So yeah, it wastn that bad to drive a monitor like this. Two of that Matrox card actually has too much resolution avaliable

[KaneTW]

FPGAs also don't have publicly listed price breaks. I've heard stories of 10x+ price cuts over the digikey price on mid-to-high end FPGAs

[Rasz]

Pretty much same hardware design as Nvidia G-Sync. FPGA/CPLD with ram buffer to refresh LCD independently from incoming data rate.

I remember when these were announced. I wanted one bad. If I recall correctly the main market being addressed was medical imaging. It is hard to get the resolution of a standard x-ray without film. But film processing  cost and slow turnaround time for developing adds up so the high cost of the monitors could still have a quick pay back time.

afaik medical requirements are entirely different, dynamic range is the most important spec - you really want to spot that slight contrast/gradient change indicating potential tumors

[EEVblog]

Always wanted to ask that: what's the origin of the "come-a-gutsa" saying? What does it mean, exactly? How to spell it properly? Is it a "Dave'ism" or is it one of these funny Australian things to say? It's so hilarious I lose it every time I hear Dave say that. I just have to know!

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=come-a-gutsa
It means fail in some spectacular way.

[Fungus]

i wonder what kind pc built you needed to run 4k in 2001 and was there even any games what had 4k resolution option?

It would be a non-gaming PC (yes, they exist!)

i wonder what kind pc built you needed to run 4k in 2001 and was there even any games what had 4k resolution option?

Probably multiple PCs, commonly done for building elaborate flight simulators back then. (Nowadays, it's more common to just add extra GPUs.)

It might not even be used for animated graphics. Some people need resolution/contrast for still images.

[Fungus]

Always wanted to ask that: what's the origin of the "come-a-gutsa" saying? What does it mean, exactly? How to spell it properly?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/come_a_gutser

(not quite as gorey as Dave's definition)

[salvagedcircuitry]

These monitors are truly an object of lust. I was looking into them a year ago as a replacement for my 2560x1600 LCDs. 16:10 aspect ratio is the aspect ratio of kings and in my eyes, the t221 is the only step up.

I mean just look at this:

from https://warosu.org/g/thread/50886658

Hubba, hubba hubba. The only other monitor that is worthy of my desk space is the beloved surface studio monitors. 3:2 aspect ratio 

There is a dude who made dns-59 to dual link dvi adapters for the t220/t221 monitors.  Looks like this:

He was able to push the monitors to 55hz over the 48hz. Here's a video from him about eyefinity with these puppies


more T221 info:
http://www.ibmfiles.com/pages/t221.htm

[mariush]

There is a dude who made dns-59 to dual link dvi adapters for the t220/t221 monitors.  Looks like this:

You can buy DMS-59 to 2xDVI cables for less than 10$ so it's nothing special, here's a random example : https://www.ebay.com/itm/DMS-59-Male-to-2-Dual-Link-DVI-I-24-5-Pin-Splitter-Adapter-Cable-ED/132014940257

The thick borders would be a deal breaker for me.

If you want to experiment, you could buy a couple 40" 4K  VA or IPS TVs and remove the panels from the plastic case to stick them together, and you can drive them with a couple DisplayPort ports or HDMI 2.0 outputs these days.

Or you could get 3 43" like these 275$ Samsung ones: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16889356448?Item=N82E16889356448