Lee Gyu-lee is a business writer at The Korea Times, focusing primarily on IT & telecommunications, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and KOTRA. Prior to this, she has covered a wide range of cultural news, from film, television and K-pop to lifestyle and fashion.
Samsung unveils industry’s 1st UFS 5.0 memory optimized for on-device AI
Samsung Electronics unveiled its latest universal flash storage 5.0 solution / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
By Lee Gyu-lee
UFS 5.0 solution to cut latency, speed up mobile AI
Samsung Electronics unveiled its latest universal flash storage (UFS) 5.0 solution on Tuesday, targeting surging demand for faster and more power-efficient storage as artificial intelligence (AI) workloads increasingly shift from the cloud to on-device processing.
The development comes as generative AI applications become increasingly capable of running directly on devices, driving a sharp increase in the volume of data handled locally and transforming storage from a simple data repository into critical infrastructure for AI workloads.
The company said its UFS 5.0 sets a new benchmark for mobile memory, with improved performance expected to cut latency and speed up response times for large language models running on-device.
“In the era of on-device AI, storage devices are evolving into a key driver defining AI experiences,” said Choi Jang-seok, Samsung Electronics’ head of memory product planning.
“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.”
The solution integrates the latest embedded memory interface standard from the semiconductor consortium Joint Electron Device Engineering Council and is built on Samsung’s ninth-generation vertical NAND, achieving data transfer speeds of up to 10.8 gigabytes per second (Gbps).
It also delivers a sequential write speed of up to 9.5 Gbps, more than twice as fast as the previous UFS 4.1 solution.
An infographic of Samsung Electronics' universal flash storage performance evaluation / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
Samsung said the bandwidth puts UFS 5.0 among the highest-performing mobile storage solutions available, enabling significantly faster storage and processing of large volumes of data for on-device AI applications.
The latest solution’s power efficiency is also improved by more than 40 percent compared to the UFS 4.1 solution by implementing a number of new innovations, including clock gating and multivoltage technologies.
Clock gating reduces power use by turning off signals to idle parts of a chip, while multivoltage technology lowers energy consumption and heat by supplying only the necessary power to each circuit.
These enhancements help to considerably reduce the power required to transfer the same amount of data, drastically lowering overall power consumption and extending the battery life of next-generation mobile devices.
Samsung has engineered the UFS 5.0 solution into an ultra-compact package, about 16.7 percent smaller than the predecessor. The smaller form factor is designed to give device makers more flexibility and internal space for a wide range of applications, including mobile, wearable and extended reality (XR) devices.
Samsung will begin mass production of its UFS 5.0 in the fourth quarter of this year in a variety of capacities up to one terabyte and expand its supply beyond flagship smartphones to XR headsets and AI wearables.
Meanwhile, Samsung's sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chip, HBM4, has surpassed $1 billion in sales, according to industry sources, driven by surging demand just four months after the company became the first in the world to begin mass production in February.
HBM4 chips are designed for next-generation AI accelerators, including Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform. Nvidia's graphics processing units are widely used to power generative AI applications.
Samsung is expected to significantly increase HBM4 shipments through the end of the year, with annual sales projected to surpass $10 billion in 2026.