As soon as the second half of the year! Android finally surpasses the iPhone in this performance

UFS 4.0 is here!

Recently, Samsung Semiconductor announced that it has successfully developed the industry's best-performing UFS 4.0 (Universal Flash Storage) memory chip and has been certified by the JEDEC Solid State Storage Association.

In terms of performance, UFS 4.0 increases bandwidth speed per channel to 23.2Gbps, which is twice that of UFS 3.1. Based on Samsung's seventh-generation V-NAND flash memory and self-developed master control, the measured continuous reading speed can reach 4200MB/s and the continuous writing speed can reach 2800MB/s.

For comparison, the Samsung 512GB UFS 3.1 flash memory chip (released in March 2020), the best performance in the industry, is nominally continuous reading speed of up to 2100MB/s and writing speed of 1200MB/s.

In this way, the read and write performance of UFS 4.0 has been doubled!

The most critical thing is that UFS 4.0 is actually low in unit power consumption while speeding up. The new memory will provide sequential read speeds of 6.0MB/s per mA (mA), a 46% improvement over the previous 3.1 version of UFS. This means that smartphones equipped with UFS 4.0 will have longer battery life and higher read and write speeds.

In addition, the UFS 4.0 flash memory chip has a package size of only 11x13x1mm and a maximum capacity of 1TB.

Looking at these data, perhaps what you are most concerned about is, what does this have to do with our ordinary users? I would say, that's so relevant!

At present, most of our mobile phones are stored using the UFS protocol, and common ones include UFS3.1, UFS3.0, UFS2.1, UFS2.0, etc. For example, in recent years, we often hear that the "troika" describing the performance indicators of flagship mobile phones includes: Snapdragon 8+ LPDDR5 + UFS3.1, which is basically the standard indicator of the current Android flagship.

The UFS 3.1 standard was released in February 2020, which has been counted for more than 2 years, and now the storage standard of LPDDR5+UFS3.1 has been dropped to thousands of mobile phones, which can be described as quite popular. Now, Samsung has released the UFS4.0 storage solution, which will also bring a new storage standard to the next flagship phone.

The performance of UFS flash memory is directly tied to the performance of the phone, and many times it is even more important than the processor. For example, when the mobile phone reads 4K HD videos, UFS3.1 takes less time than UFS3.0, and the loading time is less than 1/3 of eMMC5.1. Correspondingly, when experiencing the game, the UFS3.1 mobile phone has lower latency and smoother screen, so that our mobile phone will not stutter when dealing with more scenes.

Before the UFS3.1 was just widely popularized, some flagship mobile phones were criticized by many users because they were also equipped with the "backward" UFS3.0. This time, the new UFS4.0, as a major upgrade in performance, will soon become an important parameter indicator for us to measure the "true flagship".

Another point, from the data disclosed by this official, UFS4.0 has also achieved catch-up for the iPhone for the first time!

As we all know, the iPhone is better than the Android phone in terms of system fluency and software startup speed. In addition to the unique performance of Apple's A series self-developed processors and the consistency of Apple's closed-loop ecological experience, there is also an important reason that the flash memory used by the iPhone is NVMe protocol, which is much faster than the UFS protocol commonly used in Android phones.

The NvMe protocol greatly improves the read speed of the hard disk, the sequential read speed of the iPhone is as high as 3200MB/s, and the sequential write speed is about 1200MB/s. The best UFS3.1 chip has a maximum read speed of 2100MB/s and a write speed of 1200MB/s.

It can be seen that compared with the iPhone, the current top Android flagships have obvious differences in flash performance. The official 4200MB/s read rate and 2800MB/s write speed (the rate after the actual installation will definitely decrease) will not only achieve the catch-up of the iPhone, but even achieve a significant surpass.

In addition, the new storage technology used in UFS 4.0 flash memory can more easily support 1TB of large storage, which helps the promotion of large-storage space mobile phones, and it is expected that next year' 512GB and 1TB capacity smartphone products will be more popular. Samsung said the large bandwidth of UFS 4.0 flash memory is ideal for 5G smartphones that require a lot of data processing, and hopes to see the technology adopted in VR, AR and cars.

In addition to flash memory, the LPDDR5X is also about to start mass production, and the performance is about 20% better than the LPDDR5. The Tianji 9000 processor has long realized the support for LPDDR5X. In terms of the Qualcomm camp, Samsung's first 14nm-based LPDDR5X memory has been verified and used on the Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform in March, and it is expected to be commercially available soon.

The Samsung UFS 4.0 flash memory will be put into mass production in the third quarter of this year. In other words, as soon as the second half of the year should be able to see the advent of related mobile phones, such as Samsung's own Galaxy Z Fold 4, Z Flip 4 and next year's S23 series.

So by 2023, TSMC's 3nm+LPDDR5X+UFS4.0 will be a new benchmark for the performance of flagship mobile phones. With the blessing of this performance combination, the performance of Android mobile phones will go up to a new level. If nothing else, Ann Rabbit's running score should be experienced.