Samsung’s New 256GB Flash Memory are Aimed for Premium Smartphones
While most manufacturers are currently focused on improving the battery and design aspects of a smartphone, Samsung seems to be aiming for something completely unforeseen. The Korean giant announced a brand new 256GB embedded flash memory chips built specifically for high-end phones. These chips are more compact than a MicroSD card and are based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard.
The new chips are almost twice as quick as SATA-based solid state storage drives on PCs and in some cases, three times faster than high-performance external microSD cards. To achieve those beaming fast speeds, they wield two lanes of data transfer resulting in 850 megabytes per second (MB/s) reading pace and 260MB/s during sequential writing processes.
“By providing high-density UFS memory that is nearly twice as fast as a SATA SSD for PCs, we will contribute to a paradigm shift within the mobile data storage market,” mentioned Joo Sun Choi, Executive Vice President, Memory Sales and Marketing, Samsung Electronics. “We are determined to push the competitive edge in premium storage line-ups – OEM NVMe SSDs, external SSDs, and UFS – by moving aggressively to enhance performance and capacity in all three markets.”
To get a clear perspective of its momentum, you’ll be able to transfer a 5 GB-equivalent Full H D movie through USB 3.0 in about 12 seconds or watch a 4 K movie in split-screen whilst performing less intensive tasks parallelly. Sure, that depends on whether your phone has enough power to match those numbers, however as of now, Samsung is solely targeting this hardware to flagship smartphones.
With more and more smartphones packing 4K recording options and virtual reality becoming mainstream as time goes by, having a memory chip that can handle those features will definitely help enhance the experience. Figures Samsung provided look quite impressive, although, nothing can be predicted until we see on an actual product.
Samsung says that these chips will go into mass production as demand from O Ems increases. Recently, a rumor pointed at the iPhone 7 coming in a 256GB variant, also Samsung’s Note 6 is yet to arrive which will most probably the first glimpse of this new chip.