Samsung will use successor emmc flash storage in smartphones in 2015
Samsung would start mass production of ufs 2.0 at the end of this year and use this successor to emmc flash memory in high-end smartphones in 2015. This means that the transition to universal flash storage is slower than expected.
ETNews reports that Samsung will start mass production of ufs 2.0 soon, and the Korean news site is betting that the Galaxy S6 will come with the next generation of flash storage. According to Samsung, the flash memory combines the speed of an SSD and the energy efficiency of emmc.
The advantage of ufc over emmc is, among other things, that a serial interface is used, whereas emmc still has to make do with a parallel 8-bit interface. Samsung speaks of a bandwidth that is three times higher: 1.2GB/s for ufs 2.0 compared to 400MB/s for emmc version 5.0. With this, ufs would also have twice the throughput speed than sata-600. Furthermore, the latency would be a factor of three lower than that of emmc.
In addition to full duplexing, the Jedec standard also supports command queuing so that a host system can continue with other tasks after sending the read and write actions. Partly because modern smartphones often work with large files, such as for high-resolution video, the new standard would be welcome. Emmc is based on the mmc standard for memory cards and combines the memory and controller in a small BGA package. The speed has been increased in successive generations, but the stretch now seems out of the norm.
The switch from emmc storage memory to ufs for high-end smartphones and tablets has therefore been expected for some time. For example, Toshiba announced at the beginning of this year that production of its ufs 2.0 products would start in the second quarter and that manufacturer even said it is working with Qualcomm to ensure that the Snapdragon 805-soc supports the memory. It is unknown why no devices with ufs 2.0 memory from Toshiba have appeared last year. Incidentally, Toshiba mentioned a bandwidth of 5.8Gbit/s, about 725MB/s, for its ufs 2.0 HS-G2 products and 11.6Gbit/s, or about 1.45GB/s for HS-G3. Ufs would be more economical during read and write, but the idle and sleep consumption of emmc would be lower, which could also be a reason for delayed adoption.
The costs for ufs 2.0 products are probably still high in the first instance, so that initially high-end products will be equipped with it. Xiaomi will also use ufs for smartphones, according to ETNews, but that will probably apply to many more manufacturers in 2015.
More than a week ago, it was rumored that the Galaxy S6 has a Broadcom chip that should reduce power consumption by 80 percent when using WiFi and GPS. That would be possible by having things handled by a separate chip instead of the application processor.
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