CoreData, among other things, is designed to keep an application memory footprint low.
However I could not find any information on weather or not it implements the didReceiveMemoryWarning notification.
I assume it drops its cache as this would be the sensible thing to do?
Core Data does something conceptually similar called faulting which limits how many object in the graph are in memory at any given time. I’d read up on it here https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CoreData/Articles/cdFaultingUniquing.html