No it’s the oposite.
By default, the autograd saves all intermediary results needed for the backward pass.
The checkpointing tool has been added to allow not storing all intermediary results. So you only need it if you don’t have enough memory to store your model, otherwise it will just slow down your model. So for the function/module that is given to it, no intermediary result will be saved and they will be recomputed during the backward.