Samsung and Xiaomi are preparing to enter a new age of technology, where they replace the last gen parts of their smartphones with new technology. Aside from CPUs and RAM, storage will also get replaced, so instead of the aging eMMC we’ll see UFS storage.

This one is faster and it’s meant to go live in 2016. The eMMC is based on the MMC standard that came in 1997 and right now we’ve reached version 5.0, with speeds of around 400 Mbps. Meanwhile, UFS is able to reach as high as 1.45 Gb/s. Of course this is all on paper and the actual speed will be much lower. The evolution of connectivity and streaming services demand storage speed increase, since you’ll need better read/write speeds if you want to start using 5G some day.

Using a serial interface (LVDS), the controller will be able to handle writing along with reading on the new memory. This is unlike the eMMC, that could only perform two parallel operations. UFS also brings command queuing, allowing the user to create a data queue that will process and sort info in the order of importance. In order to really get the most out of these memories, smartphones will need a USB 3.0 interface instead of USB 2.0.

via frandroid