The Samsung Galaxy S6’s Memory Is So, So Much Faster Than Other Phones

MWC 2015 had some pretty impressive announcements, but nothing as high-profile as the Galaxy S6. Here’s the thing, though — the next Samsung flagship smartphone has a huge improvement in one crucial, but under-appreciated area.

The Samsung Galaxy S6 and its S6 Edge counterpart will be the first released in Australia to feature UFS 2.0, a brand new flash memory standard that is at least three times faster than the eMMC 5.0 and 5.1 used in current and last-generation phones like the LG G3, HTC One M8, Samsung’s own Galaxy S5 and even the relatively new Galaxy Note 4.

The difference isn’t just incremental, it’s enormous. When you’re talking theoretical numbers of 250MBps for eMMC 5.1 and a massive 725MBps for UFS 2.0, that’s a threefold increase in potential performance just from one aspect of the smartphone — not even taking into account similar improvements with the S6’s octa-core Exynos 2.1GHz + 1.5GHz processor and LPDDR4 RAM. This is quantum leap stuff.

Crucially, UFS supports simultaneous reads and writes — so your phone can actually multi-task like its multicore processor suggests it’ll be able to. Despite that, it prioritises incoming transfers, so if you’re moving a bunch of movies or music onto your phone it’ll happen as fast as possible. The actual difference? Testing in AndroBench the Galaxy S6’s result of 77.2 is miles ahead of the Note 4’s 20.6, the LG G3’s 15.71 and the Sony Xperia Z3’s 14.78. The difference between that first number and the last three is enormous.

That kind of yearly improvement is genuinely surprising. Samsung was one of the first to pioneer HEVC in smartphones, so it’s great to see the company constantly improvement.

Need a bit more background info? Coming to us via the guys at PhoneArena again, here’s a video explaining the differences between UFS and older mobile memory tech: