Samsung today announced that it has started the mass production of industry first 128GB of ultra-fast embedded memory based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard.  

UFS 2.0 is the next-generation JEDEC-compliant flash storage option for upcoming smartphones. It offers faster read and write access to aid smartphones in recording 4K videos and to make sure they remain responsive even under load. Samsung boasts that its UFS 2.0 based memory chips are 2.7x faster than traditional eMMC 5.0 based memory chips used in most premium smartphones today.

Additionally, the chips are capable of delivering read and write speeds that can rival that of an SSD, with their random read speed being up to 12x times faster than a high-speed memory card. Despite the significant performance gain, Samsung says that its latest memory chips consume 50% less power.

“With our mass production of ultra-fast UFS memory of the industry’s highest capacity, we are making a significant contribution to enable a more advanced mobile experience for consumers,” said Jee-ho Baek, Senior Vice President of Memory Marketing, Samsung Electronics. “In the future, we will increase the proportion of high-capacity memory solutions, in leading the continued growth of the premium memory market.”

Samsung will be providing its memory chips in an ePOP solution, which allows them to be stacked directly on top of the SoC,  thereby reducing the space occupied by them by nearly 50 percent.

Samsung will be offering its new UFS 2.0 based memory chips in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB variants to customers. The company expects them to be used widely in high-end devices of the future, with eMMC based solutions remaining popular in mid-range devices.

If OEMs do end up switching to Samsung’s UFS 2.0 based memory chips, we should see a significant improvement in responsiveness of Android devices especially when under load.

It is also possible that we will see Samsung make use of its UFS 2.0 memory chips on the upcoming Galaxy S6, especially after it was reported earlier today that the handset will be available in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB storage variants.