Samsung has announced its new built-in flash storage chips, which could potentially make their way into this year’s Galaxy S6 smartphone.
The new chips are the world’s first consumer-ready flash memory units to be based on the eMMC 5.1 standard.
What’s more, the standard was only just approved by the semiconductor industry standard’s group JEDEC, marking the chips as assuredly fresh fare.
What is eMMC 5.1?
eMMC stands for embedded multi-media card, a chip commonly found in electronic devices that provides storage.
Unfortunately for chipmakers, smartphone eMMC units don’t get the recognition they deserve, with handset performance often attributed to processors and RAM instead.
Whenever you access or save a file on a smartphone however, you’re utilising the eMMC, so improvements to flash storage read or write speeds results in a performance boost for your device.
Samsung’s current eMMC 5.0 flash memory landed in devices back in 2013, with 64GB chips managing read and write speeds of 250MB/s and 90MB/s respectively.
The new eMMC 5.1 storage can write at speeds reaching 125MB/s, marking a significant leap in the memory tech.
Random read performance is also revealed to increase from 7000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) to 11000 IOPS, with random write performance jumping from 7000 IOPS to 13000 IOPS.
Samsung also said the eMMC 5.1 line-up would consist of 16GB, 32GB, an 64GB offerings.
Will the Samsung Galaxy S6 get eMMC 5.1 flash storage?
While Samsung hasn’t confirmed that this memory standard will land in the Galaxy S6, the tech firm did offer some clues as to the availability of the chip.
“We’re already in the process of preparing to ship our first eMMC 5.1 products to some smartphone and tablet OEMs,” wrote the tech giant.
This gels suspiciously well with the expected March 1 launch of the Galaxy S6, so it’s definitely one to watch.
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Interestingly, last year we reported that Samsung might trade out its current eMMC storage for the far nippier Universal Flash Storage.
UFS works by pairing a solid state drive with a low-power EMMC, resulting in super-speedy 1.2GB/s transfers.
Unfortunately, Samsung might opt to use eMMC 5.1 in the Galaxy S6, and leave UFS for a later handset – perhaps the Galaxy S7 or Note 5?