Every year chip makers release new processors that bring better performance and/or improved efficiency to smartphones. But processors are only one of the factors in smartphone performance. Another is the type of storage.

Over the past few years we’ve seen smartphone makers start to adopt UFS 2.0 and UFS 2.1 storage, which offer a big boost in read/write speeds.

Now it looks like we’re getting a bit closer to the launch of UFS 3.0, which is said to be up to twice as fast as UFS 2.1.

The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association expects UFS 3.0 to offer top speeds up to 2.4 GB/s, up from the 1.2 GB/s theoretical limit of UFS 2.1. The current plan is to launch the new standard in the 2nd half of 2018.

Now several Chinese and Taiwanese sites include Benchlife.info and CTimes are reporting that UFS 3.0 intellectual property licensing has begun and that Taiwanese electronics company Phison has begun working on a UFS 3.0 controller.

So it looks like the next-gen high-speed solid-state storage could be ready to ship next year, as planned. Whether we’ll start to see phones, tablets, or other devices using the new technology remains to be seen.

UFS 2.0 and 2.1 modules have been available for a while, but there are still phones that ship with slower (and cheaper) eMMC storage.

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4 replies on “UFS 3.0 flash storage to support speeds up to 2.4GB/s”

  1. All chromebooks and cheap laptops should be made with ufs 2.0 hard disks. RIP emmc. RPi4 need ufs and a72.

    1. Agreed. While I think RiPi needs a higher performance model, they should offer….
      …at the minimum:
      16nm
      2.5GHz Dual-core Cortex A72
      1.5GHz Dual-core Cortex A53
      0.5GHz Octa-core Mali G71
      1.5GHz 4GB LPDDR4
      0.3GHz 64GB UFS 2.0

      Or more ideally:
      +14nm FinFet
      2.5GHz Quad-core Cortex A73
      1.5GHz Quad-core Cortex A35
      1.0GHz Twelve-core Mali G72
      1.9GHz 4GB LPDDR4
      0.4GHz 64GB UFS 2.1

      Or Stupidly Outrageous Ultrabook spec:
      +10nm LPP
      3.0GHz Quad-core Cortex A75
      2.0GHz Quad-core Cortex A55
      1.0GHz Twenty-core Mali G72
      2.2GHz 8GB LPDDR4X
      0.6GHz 256GB UFS 3.0

      1. Look, I’m as agreeable that the platform would be freaking awesome with more specifications. But ARM drivers are notoriously bad. There’s a reason the GPU has stayed mostly the same albeit, higher clocked.

        1. Yeah, I know.
          Even something focused on developers like the Nokia N900 had proprietary blobs, and wasn’t fully open-source. I think the theoretical technology is designed and contract licensed (eg ARM) to companies, then an intermediary company designs the full-system and drivers (eg MediaTek), and has a the order stamped out on a wafers by a fabrication facility (eg TSMC).

          The first and third part of that chain do what is required no more, no less.
          The middle part (eg HiSilicon, MediaTek, RockChip, AMLogic, Allwinner, etc etc) are the ones to make bad designs, buggy drivers, and little to no documentation and open-drivers for device builders. This leaves further workers like the OS builders and developers empty.

          Even Samsung is a big offender here, where they actually have some documentation and source-code, but usually missing portions of it like Wifi. And let’s not talk about Nvidia either….

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