Why do video game cartridges and motherboards need a battery to maintain save data but a simple SD card does not?

Question

Why do video game cartridges and motherboards need a battery to maintain save data but a simple SD card does not?

In: 7

Answer 1

these devices use volatile memory ot store their data

for cartridges this was a necessity of the time since nonvolatile memory was expensive and the majority of it was used to store the data of the game itself which you could set as Read only(ROM).

for motherboards its used to save the clock state and any options required(this is known as the CMOS) while the BIOS/UEFI exists in a type of memory meant to be read only except under a specific setup(EEPROM).