Samsung UFS 5.0 Doubles Smartphone Storage Speeds To Turbocharge On-Device AI
Samsung is touting the development of its new Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 5.0 chips that operating at up to a blistering 10.8 gigabytes per second (GB/s) to help accelerate on-device artificial intelligence (AI) workloads on next-generation smartphones and other mobile devices. The announcement follows a similar one by rival Kioxia earlier this year.
"In the era of on-device AI, storage devices are evolving into a key driver defining AI experiences," said Jangseok Choi, head of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. "As we successfully move beyond the development stage of the industry’s first UFS 5.0 solution, Samsung is setting a new standard for storage on the go and will continue to drive innovation for the next-generation mobile platform market."
The 10.8GB/s metric applies to sequential read speeds while sequential writes can hit up to 9.5GB/s. Compared to the previous generation UFS 4.1 standard, which can hit up to 4.3GB/s for sequential reads and up to 4.1GB/s for sequential writes, Samsung's UFS 5.0 solution is more than twice as fast.
Samsung sees UFS 5.0 as an important development as AI increasingly moves from the cloud to on-device processing. This shift creates a need for more capacity and faster storage to handle the kind of large data demands imposed by AI workloads.
It's not just about speed, though. Samsung says it implemented several innovations to increase power efficiency. Through chip design techniques such as clock gating and multi-voltage technologies, Samsung claims its UFS 5.0 storage solution improves power efficiency by more than 40% compared to its UFS 4.1 storage.
"These enhancements help to considerably reduce the power required to transfer the same amount of data, drastically lowering overall power consumption and extending the battery life of next-generation mobile devices," Samsung says.
Barring any last-minutes setbacks, Samsung will begin mass producing UFS 5.0 chips in the fourth quarter of this year in capacities of up to 1 terabyte (TB). These chips will find their way to flagship phones and various weables, such as XR headsets.
