7 ms·

High memory consumption eats battery life too

• _Algernon_ 5y ago
  Given that only one of those components tends to have active cooling as a requirement, I'll assume that the difference in energy consumption is at least an order of magnitude. Happy to be proven wrong though.
  • dspillett 5y ago
    Even in the lowest power consuming of sleep modes volatile RAM still needs to be constantly refreshed, so considering a device with a duty cycle like that of a phone or tablet you might find the power being used for memory is more significant than you think. But that refresh is essentially a fixed cost from a software PoV, if the memory is not used it'll still be refreshed, where chunks of modern CPUs can be almost completely turned off when not needed. There are secondary costs of extra memory use though (CPU to populate & later read, IO subsystem activity as there is less free memory for cache, etc.).