Most current smartphones use a type of flash storage called eMMC. But Samsung has started mass producing a new embedded memory solution which the company says offers faster speeds without consuming any more power.
Samsung says phones with its new UFS 2.0 memory will offer quicker boot times, faster file copying, and improved multitasking, among other things.
The new memory offers sequential read speeds up to 350 MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 150 MB/s. That’s substantially faster than the 250 Mb/s and 125 MB/s speeds you’d get with the eMMC 5.1 solution Samsung introduced just last week and nearly 4 times as fast as a typical removable SD card.
Samsung is making 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB versions of its UFS 2.0 memory.
While the company will likely make the storage solution available to any company that wants to include the embedded memory in upcoming smartphones or tablets, Samsung’s announcement that mass production has begun comes just a week ahead of the 2015 Mobile World Congress trade show, where the company is expected to unveil the Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone.
A report suggesting Samsung would use UFS 2.0 storage in its upcoming flagship phone surfaced in November. The company hasn’t confirmed that the Galaxy S6Â will be the first phone to use the new embedded memory solution. But the timing of this week’s announcement is certainly interesting.
eMMC storage is like an SD_C card.
I don’t understand why they don’t just
use the controller and flash from an
SDD (they do have mSATA SSDs).
Or is it that these SSD components
are too bulky or expensive to use as
eMMC replacements, and the article is
saying Samsung has just come up with
something better than eMMC but without
the above limitations that SSD components
would have in this application?
UFS 2.0 uses MIPI Gear 3 as the physical signalling layer. It is probably 100 times more power efficient than SATA (electrically and protocol efficiency). The future of laptop and desktop flash storage is the m.2 port with the PCIe physical layer. This will eventually connect directly into the CPU (just like the 16 lanes for graphics). Checkout the Anandtech review of the Samsung 512MB m.2 SSD.
I wish there was a Report Spam link below each post.