Well let's see, what do we use at work... Cadence. No. HFSS. No. Hyper-V. No. ADS. No.

Hmmm... Maybe not so much. There's plenty of shit that doesn't use OpenCL, but where you want speed and big memory, but there's little to no GPU use.

Also you find a lot of stuff that does GPU acceleration, wants CUDA. The research labs we have that do GPU based work are all NVidia all the time on account of CUDA.

Hardware passthru, I already do this for RAID cards on my ESX setup.
I'm kind of curious about the use case for this ?

Hell, even the hard drives are gaming, or are making their way there. SCSI was the only way to go, even though SATA overtook the performance long ago.
Even old U320 SCSI drives have seek times ca. 2/3 those (and consequently higher IOPS) of the fastest SATA drives.

Then they started putting 2.5" SAS drives in, which are laptop SATA drives with a bigger pricetag.
You are utterly clueless.

You've only got to hold an enterprise SAS drive and a consumer SATA laptop drive in each hand to know they have to be manufactured differently. Then again, you've probably never actually seen an enterprise SAS drive, let alone held one.

This is before even starting to look at the different specifications - where can I buy a 15k RPM laptop SATA drive ? How am I going to get multiple paths and multiple controllers accessing the disk when SATA doesn't support such a thing ?

The rest of your post is equally misinformed rubbish. I don't know who you build "servers" for, but I pity them. There's a difference between being able to assemble decent server-grade hardware on a budget that precludes big-name vendors, and not understanding what server-grade hardware (or the philosophy behind it) actually is, and you are clearly the latter.

You can derive some other requirements from LONG_MAX etc. Char has to be at least 8 value bits (and for unsigned, it cannot have padding), but it can be larger. Short must have at least 16 value bits, and long must have at least 32. And then there is the sizeof equation that you mentioned - char is implicitly a part of it because sizeof reports size in chars.

You're wrong here. Compilers can and do use a great deal of leeway when optimizing around unspecified behavior. For example, g++ often assumes that "this" is never null, and also that two pointers of different types cannot alias. While I'm not aware of any compiler that reorders fields, it's not because there is some expectation on behalf of the programmers there - who in their sane mind would depend on fields being ordered across visibility specifiers, and why?

The same clause is present in the C89 standard. It may be something that was true in very early compilers before standardization.

With respect to char and byte, it's pretty much required to be one and the same (really, char is the fundamental unit in the spec - everything else is measured in chars). But it does not have to be an 8-bit byte. There are architectures out there, like SHARC, where sizeof(char)==sizeof(short)==sizeof(int)==1, but value range is 2^16 for all of those.

I root for the team that provides sustainable wealth creation and jobs.
Then you shouldn't be rooting for team corporatism, which has for the last 30-odd years been creating a system of completely unsustainable wealth creation and jobs.

The period of most "sustainable wealth creation and jobs" in human history, was the few decades post-WW2, up until the late '70s when the neoliberals took over the western world.

Any country can get some of that wealth and job creation for themselves by halting their confiscatory taxation policies.
Define "confiscatory taxation policies".

Say, RAID-6? That's what you do for drive failures. The problem with drive failure isn't replacing the drive, but the data and the downtime.

With most workstations, this is easy, you can get a RAID controller, usually integrated on the board (Dell's PERC 710s are great) and you can knock in a bunch of drives and go. High performance, high resilience. No such luck on this new Pro.

Another option would be a good external system. Maybe a heavy hitting iSCSI or FC array. That's where you go for really high end, lots of storage, reliability, etc. Ahh well you are kinda screwed there too. No cards to add FC to the pro, and OS-X has no iSCSI initiator, which is shocking for a modern OS, Windows got it in 2003 and Linux in 2005.

Also you might want to look in to SSD failure rates. They aren't particularly high, but they aren't particularly low either. Oh, and they are workload dependent as well. I loves me some SSDs, but don't think they are rocks on which you can build your house.

This is the thing all Mac fans seem to miss: Apple often throws in expensive shit that people don't need, and would rather not pay for. You discover that with SSDs, they are pretty much all "fast enough" for most tasks, meaning they are not a significant bottleneck, if one at all. You can see this upgrading a SATA 2 SSD to SATA 3. You get twice the bandwidth, and benchmarks bear that out, but you notice no operational difference. It was already fast enough for what it is tasked with.

Even high end stuff in nearly all cases. Like streaming audio samples. SSDs are the best shit EVAR as far as those of us that play with audio samplers (NI Kontakt and the like ) are concerned. What you find is that all limits go away with regards to the drive. Want to stream 2000 voices at once? No problem, even "slow" SSDs are fast enough for that no problems.

So the "givashit" quotient on these hyper-fast SSDs is pretty low. If I was running a heavy hitting database maybe. Of course one wouldn't do that on a Mac Pro. For AV work? Nope, regular SSDs are fast enough and space is more of an issue than speed. You can do uncompressed 4:4:4 HD video on any SSD no problem. However you need 13GB/minute to hold it. So 1200MB/sec doesn't matter 225MB/sec is all you need and a SATA-2 SSD could do that. What you need is space for cheap. A comparatively slow 1TB SSD is more use than a lightning fast 250GB one.

It may well be redundant. The servers we use a lot of in our datacenter have "1500 watts" of power supply, divided in to two 750 watt units. They could be upgraded to 1100 watt units, 2200 watts total, if we needed. However, if you do actual load testing on the system, you find peak draw with the configuration we have to be about 600 watts, well under the limit (remember 750 is output, not input, and there's some loss in conversion). So what's the deal?

Reliability. The power is fully redundant. Even if heavily loaded, if one PSU fails the system will not need to throttle. It has WAY more PSU than it needs for that reason. That's also why the 1100s are available. We are running dual 8 core CPUs and 256GB of RAM. If we stepped up to something heavier hitting, 2 12s and 768GB for example, we'd have a peak load over what 1 PSU could handle and need to upgrade or lose full redundancy.

However that doesn't mean it is power hungry if it doesn't need to be. It'll draw around 120ish watts at idle, mostly due to the RAID array since that is magnetic and doesn't get spun down.

Of course I'd think most of this would be known to the kid of person who buys an enterprise workstation or server. That the Mac fans who like the pro don't tells me something.

Apple fans love to demand an "equal for equal" spec for comparisons, but that's silly. Party of the reason Macs often cost so much is you have to get a ton of shit you don't need. Ya, dual video cards cost a lot. Guess what? Next to nobody needs them. If you don't, they are wasted money. In a Dell, you just don't order one. With Apple? You get what you get and fuck you otherwise.

So they often lose out on pricing bigtime when you compare actual task needs. Like let's say I need a system with a fast CPU and reasonable bit of RAM. I want to run some Cadence (ok you can't do that on a Mac, but whatever). A fast quad core and 32-64GB of RAM. The Mac Pro is good there. However video needs are minimal, integrated graphics is fine, as is a $50 GPU. Oh, well there I'm screwed. While the dual GPUs won't hurt, they won't buy me anything either. So I'm paying for them and can't make use of them.

That is a problem, if money matters at least. You want to spend it on the useful things, and save it on the shit you don't need.

You don't need a Mac for AV work. Most stuff is cross platform, particularly the heavy hitting stuff. All the Avid stuff (Media Composer/Pro Tools) is either, Cubase is either, Studio One is either, Digital Performer is either, all the Adobe software is either, etc, etc. It is pretty much just the Apple products that are Mac only I the pro A/V arena.

I personally Use Cakewalk Sonar, which is PC only, and there have been a steady trickle of Mac people on the forums that are either wavering, or going PC for pro audio. Some are doing bootcamp and running Sonar, some are buying PCs because they find the cost to just be too much on an advantage.

They days of media being an "Apple thing" are long past. There's a lot of inertia in that area, after all if you've a setup and it works why change, but there isn't a technical hurdle. Unless you use FCP or Logic, you can most likely keep your exact same workflow, programs, plugins and all, and switch to Windows.

Also you are straight fucked if you have dedicated hardware that isn't USB/FW/thunderbolt. Have a Nitris DX? So sorry, nowhere to hook that up in the new Mac. Also no thunderbolt option (PCIe only for now) so you can't even rebuy it if you wanted to drop another $5000.

If all Apple keeps targeting are the people who want aesthetics, that may happen. After all, if you are doing music and a $1500 PC would meet your needs as well as a $3000 Mac, despite being less powerful, then maybe you decide that extra money would better go to some nice samples or the like.

The official story so far is that he surrendered all his documents to the journalists from the get go, and they are the ones leaking them bit by bit to maximize the impact.

Duverger's law is that FPTP tends to favor a two party system. It is statistically true, not universally true in any particular case. Furthermore, Duverger's law describes the behavior of people, but people don't have to submit to it, especially when they're aware of it.