This is the most megalomanic thing I've ever heard of. ARM has high chances to be both the next x86 and the most common embedded architecture. While at the same time Nvidia GPUs are already the de facto standard for GPU computing. So Nvidia would have monopolies in 2 verticals. No reasonable and competent antitrust commission could ever allow that - although probably everyone was betting the latter wasn't the case...
I totally agree… what’s interesting is that some of the reasons that FTC provide are totally not what’s interesting (self driving).
I have a MacBook Pro with M1 ARM chip, and I love it, it’s extremely power efficient, I don’t really have to think much about charging it. It wouldn’t be possible if NVIDIA could force its chips on Apple.
This is of course related to the fact that ARM was initially a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Tech way back in 1990. Apple was a major early investor and has been using ARM ISA chips in products since the 1990s.
If anyone is curious, third parties can license specific designs and drop them in their chips, or architecture licensees can design their own chips, like the M1, based on the instruction set architecture. There are around a dozen or so companies with an architecture license.
But I believe there is a new instruction set released by ARM every couple of years. Would Apple get automatic access to say ARMv10 architecture because of their architectural license? Or would they have to renegotiate with ARM (or NVIDIA?)
If they have to renegotiate with NVIDIA to get access to ARMv10, it would be quite nasty if NVIDIA decided they wanted a bigger piece of Apple's pie, especially if Apple has developed competitive GPU technology that made NVIDIA's somewhat obsolete.
I haven't read the license of course, but what I have read from others is that Apple has a perpetual license that gives them access to all future architectures as long as they fulfill their side of the deal (fees, etc.). That deal is with ARM, so if someone buys ARM the purchaser is still bound by the terms of existing deals.
>Apple has a perpetual license that gives them access to all future architectures as long as they fulfill their side of the deal
Each generation of ARM ISA, e.g ARMv7 and ARMv8 are treated as separate license, mostly because they are incompatible. ( Possibly with the exception of ARMv9 which is really a ARMv8++ ) You dont get future ARMv10 work just because you keep paying. ARM's extension are a different matter.
Seems like a good reason to block it. Apple could only do it with a perpetual license. Competitors would (potentially) have to abide by rules that Apple avoids.
Several companies have the same 64-bit architectural license, including
Nvidia,AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom, Cavium, HiSilicon, Applied Micro, and Apple. There are probably some others.
I go about 2-3 days without charging it under moderate (regular) use. While developing (compiling, lots of tabs, etc.), I’ll use about 80% in a day.
For reference, the last zoom call I was on (2 hours) with nearly max brightness only drained the battery ~5%. My Intel MBP would’ve been down at least 20%.
I feel like a lot of people are comparing their old Intel machines to brand new M1s with fresh batteries. Of course there will be a drastic difference. Every time I get a new laptop, the battery life is incredible, and then after a few years goes to shit. I'm sure the M1 is generally more efficient, but the difference might not be as big if you compared new vs new.
FWIW, my comparison was against a one year old MBP.
I’ve had a range of MacBooks (2013, 2016, 2020, 2021) and it just isn’t a competition. The M1 is head and shoulders above the other models in battery life.
Not just that; how long does it last while idle/sleeping? Pretty much forever; the MacBook Air I have for random OSX tasks and testing Linux on sporadically goes over a week between charges.
These things are very power efficient while actually computing, but they are extremely power efficient while idle. The whole SoC uses a couple dozen milliwatts while in active idle state (e.g. screen off, machine up and responding to pings via WiFi).
The official number is 17 hours, bu I never had to test it in real life. The crazy thing is charging to 50% in 30 minutes, and 50% is enough to get me through my trips.
That's great. Yeah, once the on-battery time is slightly greater than one workday requires, increasing it further stops being interesting.
For battery longevity, in general I would charge to 90% and then use it until 20%, then recharge to 90% again. This makes the most out of the battery charge cycles, and avoid the increased stress of close-to-0% charge (bad if there for longer time) and close-to-100% charge (less bad but still better not to go there often). But maybe M1 battery system is different for some reason, I don't know.
It’s not different. In theory recent macs are supposed to “learn” about your habits and lock charging at around 80% when you’re not going to move a while (“optimised battery charging”), but from what I’ve heard it’s not super reliable. And I’ve never seen it work properly on my iphone, whose usage is about as reliable as you could be (plus iOS has all the alarms so it knows exactly when I’m going to wake up) so I didn’t exactly have high hopes.
A more reliable solution is to manipulate pmset directly, or use something like AlDente which handles it for you (the paid version has lots of extra features but the free one suffices to avoid charging above 80% by default).
Obviously when charging time arrives you need to realise yourself and plug in somewhere between 20 and 40%.
The only annoyance is the magsafe’s LED remains amber even when the mac stops charging at 80%.
On my iphone it pretty reliably charges up to 80%, waits a few hours and then charges to 100% when I put it on the charger for the night.
On my m1 air I’ve only known it to charge to 80% after a period of several weeks where it was docked. As soon as I started using it away from power for significant amounts of time it went back to charging to 100%.
> On my iphone it pretty reliably charges up to 80%, waits a few hours and then charges to 100% when I put it on the charger for the night.
I just checked what happened last time. I went to bed around 2300, it quickly charged to 80% (getting there a bit after 2400), then stayed there until 0200, at which point it decided to charge to 100 which it had reached by 0400.
As it does every workday, and has since before I had that specific phone (which is 2 years old), the alarm woke me at 0600.
So over a 7h night it managed to spend more time at 100% than it did at 80. I’m not going to say I’m impressed, because I’m not. Based on usage pattern I could see it fail to reach 100% by 0600, but I don’t think I’ve woken at 4 once in the last 3 years.
I use an M1 Air for my daily development, and under full CPU load the battery lasts about 2.5 hours, while under no load and low screen brightness it will last for 15-20 hours.
Was that an artificial load test? The heaviest continuous load I’ve put my m1 air under was playing one of the tomb raider games, which puts a heavy load on cpu and gpu, and it still lasted 3 to 4 hours on battery.
I've been using Win11 ARM via Parallels to play older 32bit games and some newer 64bit games. It's enabled me to continue my addiction to playing on P1999 Classic Everquest Server. At the moment the main problem has been a lack of GPU power (M1 Mac Mini). Although some games run into larger issues, I assume, with the GPU itself like Borderlands 2 & 3 having a stutter every 30 seconds or so regardless of graphical settings.
Although I imagine the problem with a lot of newer crap will be draconian DRM measures freaking out at being ran in Parallels. Which are games I will never buy.
