Hacker News Reader

RAM _capacity_ has a direct effect on energy, usage not nearly much if at all.

Hardware has been around to selectively put banks into low power saving mode, but I've never heard of any commodity OS that supported anything like that. It'd require active organization of physical pages to take advantage of, if common controllers even supported it

Note that most of RAM's power consumption comes from reading and writing (a function of memory clock speed). Allocating the RAM itself is likely to meaningfully increase power draw, but accessing it will.

Are there any benchmarks around showing this? And how much extra power draw it is.

Does it? I was under the impression that all the installed RAM got refreshed all the time whether it holds useful data or not.

The state of bits in RAM has zero effect on energy usage. Caching things in memory allows for lower power consumption, though, by preventing duplication of effort by the CPU.

Edit: Originally said "zero effect on memory usage", which makes very little sense!

Surely not as bad as disk.