Market Requirements - Compaq AP750 - Professional - 256 MB RAM Technical Manual

Compaq Professional Workstations Graphics Product Positioning
components and offer the full Compaq warranty, providing uncompromising stability and cost of
ownership.
The Premier graphics partners are Compaq's closest allies and these integrated solutions and
option kits meet the needs of roughly 80 percent of the market. This is also where Compaq
invests most heavily in terms of its partner relationships. While these solutions pass through the
GEP lab, Compaq also spends months working closely with the graphics vendor and professional
ISVs to tune and integrate the solutions.
This tiered approach is a pragmatic way to make investments and position and deliver solutions in
an increasingly fragmented market. But while delivery and integration of solutions are key
consideration points for customers, it is also important to understand the relative merits and
positioning of the controllers based on technical merits. After all, the workstation and graphics
markets were both built upon a foundation of technical excellence. The following sections outline
the customer requirements and technical capabilities that help position Compaq's graphics
solutions for key market segments.

Market Requirements

As a corollary to the merging of the commodity PC space and the historical technical computing
market dominated by specialized workstation products, it is understandable to consider the
customer requirements for workstation graphics in two broad categories, each of which spans the
more traditional performance-oriented delineations for graphics (e.g 2D, Multi-display 2D and
3D controllers). The best way to think about these two classes are to apply labels based on
customer attributes. Compaq considers these classes as those with basic "Productivity"
requirements and those with more demanding "Performance" requirements. Essentially, these can
be defined as follows:
Productivity customers
Productivity customers are best represented by the class of users that have traditionally purchased
highest performance PCs for maximum computing power, and are moving up to Intel-based
workstation for more of the same. Another set of these customers may be moving to NT
workstations from RISC platforms used where performance graphics were not available or
required, such as Sun Ultra 5 or SPARCstation or IBM RS/6000 systems used for risk
management, financial trading, ECAD and publishing. These customers too were typically
purchasing workstations for compute performance or to suit application requirements for
operating system support or SCSI storage subsystems. In general, these customers seek the best
value available when it comes to graphics and believe that price/performance is critical in the
consideration set. Since the planned usage probably does not stress graphics performance with
large models or unique feature requirements (as per the legacy of the users), these customers will
typically sacrifice some features found in higher-end "Performance" solutions. Also for this
reason, and perhaps because many of these customers plan to run on homegrown applications,
many also believe that application certification is not a critical requirement for this class of
product.
Since graphics performance has historically not been a bottleneck or a key purchase
consideration, many of this class of customer consider graphics controller branding a secondary if
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