Was dual FirePro dumb?

thekev said:

bleh, perhaps I'm misinterpreting the goal of that math. On the second one it appears you're just storing the numerical value of a character address (not the characters themselves) to an integer, then incrementing fastloose and pointing c_ptr at fastloose, unless I'm missing something. Was the concern that this is possible?

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The first is doing the "same" incrementing. It is shorthand for

c_ptr = c_ptr + 1

On some systems and environments the two different fragments will happen to do the same thing.

The concern isn't that it is possible, but more so that it is condoned. Contributing in large fraction of security buffer overflows is code blindly marching along issuing "c_ptr++ " completely out of appropriate context. A major contributing factor there is that folks treat it as just as integer number you simply can add to. So they just do.

These machines typically encounter long refresh cycles, so I suspect they wouldn't want to build in some room for growth.

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I don't suspect Apple is trying to suppress these machines onto any shorter refresh cycles than they already support. The vast majority of people who buy systems in this price class don't have the systems on "100%" utilization on day 1. or even day 365.

Apple has dropped new updates of OS X that got "more" out of previously sold hardware. OpenGL 4 capable hardware was pervasive in most of the Mac line up ( and throughout the upper half ) before OS X moved to OpenGL 4.

The notion that growth solely comes from replacing hardware to make the same static software go faster is however an outside view I don't think they ( or most of the user base ) buy into.

It's not even necessarily 3 x 4K displays so much as some combination that might otherwise hit a wall. It could be an issue of storage hookups + 2 displays.

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The GPUs aren't necessarily going power that aspect of expansion. Yes, I think there are 6 TB ports so can use them in a wide variety of combinations mixing DisplayPort/Thunderbolt output tasks, but enabling three 4K is one of those.

Short term, with most mainstream vendors focused on DVI ports and not quite as capable HDMI ports the new Mac Pro having 3 ports capable of 4K is more some competitors are going to have as standard config.

deconstruct60 said:

The first is doing the "same" incrementing. It is shorthand for

c_ptr = c_ptr + 1

On some systems and environments the two different fragments will happen to do the same thing.

The concern isn't that it is possible, but more so that it is condoned. Contributing in large fraction of security buffer overflows is code blindly marching along issuing "c_ptr++ " completely out of appropriate context. A major contributing factor there is that folks treat it as just as integer number you simply can add to. So they just do.

Click to expand...

I just re-read the code. The integer got an address value as an integer, then assigned + 1 and fed an address value back to the pointer. That was from the prior example. In either case I do understand the issue of buffer overflows with C.

deconstruct60 said:

I don't suspect Apple is trying to suppress these machines onto any shorter refresh cycles than they already support. The vast majority of people who buy systems in this price class don't have the systems on "100%" utilization on day 1. or even day 365.

Click to expand...

I'm aware of this. I meant that I don't think they would want to leave out something such as TB2 when the line is on a fairly long refresh cycle. It's not like the notebook where they sometimes encounter minor spec bumps within 8 months.

deconstruct60 said:

The GPUs aren't necessarily going power that aspect of expansion. Yes, I think there are 6 TB ports so can use them in a wide variety of combinations mixing DisplayPort/Thunderbolt output tasks, but enabling three 4K is one of those.

Click to expand...

I was referring more to supplying the appropriate bandwidth across TB ports, unless I'm missing something.

deconstruct60 said:

Short term, with most mainstream vendors focused on DVI ports and not quite as capable HDMI ports the new Mac Pro having 3 ports capable of 4K is more some competitors are going to have as standard config.

Click to expand...

I kind of disagree with that. If you can afford a display in at least the $300-500 range, there are many good displayport based displays that only maintain separate dvi outputs for legacy purposes. Native ports tend to work better than adapter solutions, which I suppose is why they do it. Either that or it's not very costly to include.

deconstruct60 said:

The first is doing the "same" incrementing. It is shorthand for

c_ptr = c_ptr + 1

Click to expand...

In other contexts, however, it can be shorthand for

or
or

There's a joke that C has the speed and efficieny of assembly language combined with readability of....assembly language.