How much RAM and SSD storage will influence MBP2020 battery duration?

[Caesar_091]

Hello,

will the duration of the battery of the same exact model of MBP 16" (i9 8‑core 2,4GHz; AMD Radeon Pro 5600M 8GB HBM2) will be influenced significantly by different RAM/SSD sizes?

My doubt is between 4TB SSD with 32GB of RAM and 8TB SSD with 64GB of RAM.

4TB with 32GB should be enough for me but I want to get ready for any future need.


TIA

 

[Patcell]

I do not have any first-hand experience testing this side-by-side. While it is true that SDRAM requires power to refresh, I seriously doubt there would be an appreciable difference in a side-by-side comparison between a machine with 32GB and one with 64GB RAM. It is more likely that the battery life will be trash in either machine if doing processing that requires that kind of memory when not on main power. I think the SSD storage will have even less of an impact, if any...

Good luck with the new machine!

 

[Sarajiel]

The difference in battery drain from the amount of RAM will most likely be negligible for most use cases, since Apple uses the same amount of chips with different density, iirc. If you have a workload that massively benefits from memory caching, you might even see a slight increase in battery life with more RAM.

Since I don't know if Apple uses higher density flash chips for their largest SSD or just increases the amount of them, it's harder to predict how the impact on battery life will be for different sizes. Unlike RAM SSDs have a much more spiky power consumption to begin with. It largely depends on the access patterns and the idle-states the controller uses for the flash chips.
My educated guess is that a larger SSD consumes more power in any case, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you will see a massive hit in battery life unless you run workloads with a large amount of constant random reads/writes.

 

[jerryk]

Some difference, but my belief is that the difference in screen brightness you choose will be larger factor.

Also, are you sure you want to spend the money for extra disk and memory knowing the replacement will be out soon?

 

[Caesar_091]

Also, are you sure you want to spend the money for extra disk and memory knowing the replacement will be out soon?

What replacement are you talking about? Don't think we will see new Intel-based MBPs. If you are referring to new Macs with ARM-based CPUs, well I am not interested in ARM CPUs right now. I am definetly more interested in having the "latest" MBP before the "new switch" and waiting 3-5 years for all apps to get converted and optimized before starting my own switch to the new architecture. Even if I am an old-school one, I no longer have the age (nor the time) to launch into the first-lines Apple products (although the experimenting nature always leads to that cute itch on the fingertips...).

@ all
Thanks you for the replies 👍😀