Everything you need to know about UFS 4.0

 Although a smartphone's performance is frequently assessed mainly on its processing power, storage speed can also have a significant impact on usability. To that reason, even though Samsung Semiconductor's release of its Universal Flash Storage 4.0 (UFS 4.0) chips has garnered little notice thus far, it has significant advantages for the consumer electronics sector.

Let's talk about what to expect from the most recent UFS 4.0 standard and when makers might start integrating it into Android tablets and smartphones.

What is UFS storage?

Early versions of Android devices used flash storage based on eMMC, which is a much slower storage technology than contemporary Universal Flash Storage (UFS). A device with a lightning-fast SoC but slow eMMC storage would probably have slow app opening times, stutters, and other slowdowns. This is the reason why eMMC is no longer used in anything other than low-cost electronics, like Chromebooks.

In the Android smartphone ecosystem, Universal Flash Storage (UFS), a more recent flash storage technology, started to gain popularity around 2016. It is possible to read and write simultaneously over the full-duplex UFS interface. The parallel or half-duplex interface used by eMMC, however, only permits one of those activities to be performed at once. Additionally, UFS uses less energy than eMMC. The UFS 3.1 standard, which is currently slightly over two years old, will be replaced by the future UFS 4.0 standard.

Why is UFS 4.0 important and what is it?

Samsung claims that the new UFS 4.0 standard delivers much faster transfer speeds, greater power efficiency, and even space savings when compared to UFS 3.1. To be more precise, UFS 4.0 can transfer data at rates of up to 23.2Gbps per lane. That is twice as fast as UFS 3.1 and four times as fast as the earlier UFS 2.1 standard. Samsung Semiconductor claims that its usage of a new, proprietary controller and an improved vertical NAND (V-NAND) architecture allowed it to accomplish this accomplishment.

The business claims that UFS 4.0 can achieve sequential read rates of up to 4,200MB/s and write speeds of up to 2,800MB/s in the real world. The claimed performance of UFS 4.0 puts it in front of most other storage technologies even though it is not quite as quick as the greatest PCIe desktop SSDs. It also touts far higher efficiency, using 46% less power than its predecessor while still pushing 6.0 MB/s per milliampere (mA).

A significant reduction in app and game loading times should result from UFS 4.0's improved capacity.

In conclusion, UFS 4.0's improved bandwidth ought to be immediately noticeable in routine circumstances like app and game loading. High definition, high frame rate video recording and other memory-intensive applications will also benefit from it. Better battery life for cellphones should result immediately from the enhanced efficiency.

In addition, Samsung thinks faster transfer rates would help new technologies like augmented and virtual reality. Indeed, faster read and write speeds may be advantageous for portable devices like the Meta Quest series in the future, especially if screen resolutions and associated asset sizes rise.

Which mobile devices support UFS 4.0 storage?

UFS 4.0 is still new as of the time this article was written and hasn't yet appeared on consumer electronics. Samsung Semiconductor anticipates that mass production will begin in the third quarter of 2022. In other words, UFS 4.0 won't be available on widely used devices until the beginning of 2023. Even then, once the production volume and yields of these chips improve, it can take some time before they are widely adopted.

The top-tier smartphones of 2023 are likely to include UFS 4.0 storage technology.

Additionally, you should anticipate that UFS 4.0 chips will cost a little more than comparable storage technologies. It will therefore start with high-end tablets and smartphones like the Galaxy S range, where manufacturer margins are larger. But soon, the technology will spread to the mid-range market as well. After all, low-cost devices like the Google Pixel 6a support the most recent UFS 3.1 standard.

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