Samsung develops industry's first UFS 5.0 storage chip to tackle AI-era demands

Samsung Electronics developed the industry's first storage chip compliant with the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 5.0 standard, as the world's largest memory producer steps up storage capacity to meet soaring data demand driven by AI.

The NAND Flash-based storage is designed to handle the predicted surge in data processing for smartphones, tablets and other AI-powered wearables like smart glasses and headsets, the chipmaker said on Tuesday. The latest range, due to enter mass production by the fourth quarter, doubled read and write speeds, according to Samsung.

“The new storage solution delivers a sequential read speed of up to 10.8 gigabytes per second [GB/s] and a sequential write speed of up to 9.5 GB/s, speeds that are respectively more than twice as fast as those of the previous UFS 4.1 standard,” it said, adding that power efficiency improved by 40 percent.

The company expects the new product to help ease the so-called memory bottleneck across products as AI workloads become increasingly data-intensive.

“In the era of on-device AI, storage devices are evolving into a key driver defining AI experiences,” said Choi Jang-seok, head of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “As we successfully move beyond the development stage of the industry’s first UFS 5.0 solution, Samsung is setting a new standard for storage on the go and will continue to drive innovation for the next-generation mobile platform market.”

BY PARK EUN-JEE [[email protected]]