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Samsung launches new 512 GB eUFS memory chips for mobile devices

Samsung today launched its new 512 GB embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) chips. Could these lead to phones with 512 GB of memory in 2018?

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Published onDecember 5, 2017

Even though Samsung is most well known for its flagship phones, it has a massive component business as well. That side of the company is making news today by announcing the industry’s first 512 GB embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS). The chips consist of eight 64-layer 512 GB V-NAND chips and a controller chip. It doubles the density of Samsung’s previous 48-layer 256 eUFS chips and takes up the same amount of space.

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According to numbers supplied by Samsung, read/write performance is impressive. Sequential read speeds reach as high as 860 MB/s and write speeds are up to 255 MB/s. Samsung says that the chips will transfer a 5 GB video clip to an SSD in about six seconds. That’s eight times faster than a typical microSD card. The new eUFS can also read 42,000 IOPS and write 40,000 IOPS for random operations, which is about 400 times faster than a microSD card. You’d expect UFS storage to be faster than a microSD card, but that’s impressively fast.

So, all those numbers are fun, but do they matter if you can’t get your hands on the chips? No, not really. That’s why Samsung says it is going to steadily increase its production volume for both 512 GB and 256 GB V-NAND chips. It describes production volume as “aggressive” which give us hope that we’ll see flagship phones in 2018 with these 512 GB chips included. The chips should also have applications in cars, laptops, tablets, and other devices that need power-efficient, high capacity storage.

What do you think of these new chips? Do we really need 512 GB of storage phones? Let us know down in the comments.