What is the ufs 3.0 standard for internal memory of mobile phones and why should you care?

The news about Samsung and its various hardware and software developments seem to have no truce in recent weeks. Last week the South Korean manufacturer unveiled its new screen technology, which would allow the front camera and fingerprint sensor to be integrated into the AMOLED panel. Months ago the brand announced the arrival of a new standard when it comes to memory technologies: UFS 3.0. Today at last, after almost half a year of waiting, it has confirmed not only its arrival, but also some of its technical characteristics, such as its greater speed compared to current UFS 2.1 memories.

UFS 3.0 memory: evolution and what they mean for your mobile phone

UFS 3.0 technology? What is that? If you are followers of the brand from South Korea, surely you know that Samsung is in charge of designing and developing most technologies related to RAM and ROM memories. Its last great advance was precisely the UFS technology, which came to replace the rudimentary eMMC memories. Its arrival dates back to 2011, and was called UFS 1.0.

The first version of this type of memory brought as its main novelty its enormous reading and writing speed compared to other types of memories such as the aforementioned eMMC. This memory consisted of a single channel to transmit the information, and the speeds it offered at that time were 300 MB / s in reading and writing. Its implementation took a long time to reach mobile phones, at least until the arrival of its improved version: UFS 1.1. Few were new in this version presented in 2012. In fact, it was not until 2013 when we saw its evolution. We refer to UFS 2.0 memories.

These memories not only included two channels of information, but also supported speeds of up to 600 MB / s per channel, with a total of 1200 MB / s read and write. Of course, its implementation in the early years was limited to solid state drives (better known as SSDs), although they were already beginning to reach some Android phones. The Samsung Galaxy S7 was, in fact, one of the first to implement this memory technology. Later, the Samsung Galaxy S8 with Exynos processor would go on to mount the first UFS 2.1 memory. In theory, the speeds offered are the same, and it is the memory that today almost all high-end mobiles mount on their internal hardware, at least to this day.

Photograph of the event taken from the Android Central website.

We come to 2018, the year UFS 3.0 arrives. This technology developed by Samsung and Qualcomm brings a series of important new features compared to its predecessors. Despite the fact that the channels are still kept in two, the speeds that it can reach start from 1450 MB / s per channel to 2900 in dual channel, although in smartphones the speed will be 1000 and 2000 MB / s in its first version. What does this mean? In practice, our mobile can handle data even faster than a common computer. This not only influences the speed of the operating system, but also the opening of applications and video processing in high resolutions.(4K and 8K). Of course, the processing of the images will allow obtaining photographs with greater detail and quality, although this largely depends on each manufacturer.

It could come with the Samsung Galaxy S10

It was a few minutes ago when the Qualcomm conference in collaboration with Samsung was held in Hong Kong, and although there has been no official confirmation, the Samsung Galaxy S10 could be the first mobile with UFS 3.0 memories. This is confirmed by the different sources close to Samsung, who pray that the next flagship of the brand will come with storage capacities of 128, 256 and 512 GB based on the aforementioned memory technology.

The last aspect that should be noted from the conference held today is that according to Qualcomm, the first mobiles with 1 TB of capacity will begin to arrive from 2021, although not many more details have been given.