I just ordered the new Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 9 370 with 96 GB of memory and the 2.8K screen.
I was wondering whether 96 GB of memory was wise considering battery life?
Any thoughts of what is the most well balanced choice and why?
Usage: Java programming, security research, running machine learning models and Elasticsearch.
Their exist virtually no reason to have less memory on the system.
battery life may be marginally impacted, more so on idle or suspended system.
hibernate may take longer, take more energy, to enter and leave. this is easily solved by reducing the size of the hibernate image.
a smaller hibernate image can also allow a more aggressive suspend/hibernate policy, recovering some of the battery life.
in my experience when programing their exist no such thing as enough memory, I can always do with more. I generally run my program without garbage collection during development to avoid dealing with that class of bugs.
I am also of the under standing that AI models are primarily limited by working memory.
/ekg
I have an update, now when my power config seems mostly correct.
I get an powertop estiment of above 16h, and an acpi estiment of above 18h at just above 80% power. which the battery charge status seems almost pined at as it have been just above 80% while investigating another issue.
battery drain according to powertop less then 3w. This is on a system with 64GB high speed ddr4, ddr5 have newer, and hopefully, better power management. This is on a Framework 13 tigerlake ( 1185g7 ), I surely hope that zen5 have better power management than a 5year(?!) old cpu.
/Zoe
I still have to wait until next month before my framework laptop gets delivered.
In the meantime my wife asked me to turn her desktop pc into Linux box; an older AM4 3600 system with an Nvidia 1080 GPU card. I will check power usage on that and a few other things. I selected Manjaro as distro.
I think power consumption might be negligible - what I was personally wondering though (as a potential difference) is what are the specs of the ram sticks they use - specifically I was wondering if there are any latency differences between the 32GB (64) and 48GB (96) ones (CL46 vs ??) - although I’m guessing they’re the same (probably?).
The best choice is probably up to you, but assuming the extra $$ is not a huge factor I’d lean towards the larger amount as Zoe mentions…
I also will put in 96GB myself Need to wait a month too for mine to arrive. You can never have to much memory 
I tried Manjaro a couple of times, it never lasted.
My wife’s PC runs Linux Mint and she finds it sufficient. Works, reliable, similar enough to Windows that she can find her way around.
I ran Mint for a couple of years and now I’m trying Arch on my desktop and Fedora on my laptop.
I’m liking both, but don’t really see the benefit for most of Arch over Fedora, and the latter was much easier to set up. (Arch is well documented and good for learning the why of Linux though.)
I started with a C64, and worked with Solaris. I started Linux with Redhat 5.2; used SuSE Debian Ubuntu, Gentoo, Proxmox and TrueNAS. I switched from Arch to Manjaro because it just a bit more stable and polished than Arch while still offering flexibility. I need something that works, I have other things to do. The last time I fixed a kernel driver was 15 years ago.