Samsung Electronics Doubling Current Smartphone Storage Speed as it Begins Mass Production of First 512GB eUFS 3.0

Based on the company’s fifth-generation V-NAND, the new memory meets the newest Universal Flash Storage industry specifications at a speed 20x faster than a typical microSD card

Samsung plans to launch a 1-Terabyte version
within the second half of the year

Samsung Electronics the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing the industry’s first 512-gigabyte (GB) embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) 3.0 for next-generation mobile devices. In line with the latest eUFS 3.0 specification, the new Samsung memory delivers twice the speed of the previous eUFS storage (eUFS 2.1), allowing mobile memory to support seamless user experiences in future smartphones with ultra-large high-resolution screens.

“Beginning mass production of our eUFS 3.0 lineup gives us a great advantage in the next-generation mobile market to which we are bringing a memory read speed that was before only available on ultra-slim laptops,” said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “As we expand our eUFS 3.0 offerings, including a 1-Terabyte (TB) version later this year, we expect to play a major role in accelerating momentum within the premium mobile market.”

Samsung produced the industry-first UFS interface with eUFS 2.0 in January, 2015, which was 1.4 times faster than the mobile memory standard at that time, referred to as the embedded multi-media card (eMMC) 5.1. In just four years, the company’s newest eUFS 3.0 matches the performance of today’s ultra-slim notebooks.

Samsung’s 512GB eUFS 3.0 stacks eight of the company’s fifth-generation 512-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND die and integrates a high-performance controller. At 2,100 megabytes-per-second (MB/s), the new eUFS doubles the sequential read rate of Samsung’s latest eUFS memory (eUFS 2.1) which was announced in January. The new solution’s blazing read speed is four times faster than that of a SATA solid state drive (SSDs) and 20 times faster than a typical microSD card, allowing premium smartphones to transfer a Full HD movie to a PC in about three seconds*. In addition, the sequential write speed also has been improved by 50 percent to 410MB/s, which is equivalent to that of a SATA SSD.

The new memory’s random read and write speeds provide up to a 36-percent increase over the current eUFS 2.1 industry specification, at 63,000 and 68,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), respectively. With the significant gains in random read and writes that are more than 630 times faster than general microSD cards (100 IOPS), a number of complex applications can be simultaneously run, while achieving enhanced responsiveness, especially on the newest generation of mobile devices.

Following the 512GB eUFS 3.0 as well as a 128GB version that are both launching this month, Samsung plans to produce 1TB and 256GB models in the second half of the year, to further help global device manufacturers in better delivering tomorrow’s mobile innovations.

* The calculation is based on transferring a 3.7GB full HD movie file from a mobile device with the 512GB eUFS 3.0 to a PC with a non-volatile memory express (NVMe) interface SSD.

※ Reference: Comparison of Samsung’s internal memory performance