UFS 3.0 And Its Influence On Smartphone Performance

So far in the year 2019, companies have developed ultra-fast 7nm processors featuring fast processing cores as well as amazing graphics and dedicated AR engines, artificial intelligence. A smartphone's performance is based on various factors, but one of the most important ones is storage quality, which has a significant impact in the long term.

Universal Flash Storage 3.0 chips were launched by JEDEC in early 2018, but from this year flash storage chips will be actually implemented in smartphones storage. Recently OnePlus 7T got launched, and it gets the UFS 3.0 storage.

What is Universal Flash Storage 3.0?

Tablets and smartphones have relied on cheaper, older eMMCs storage for information storage. But since Samsung Galaxy S6, UFS has arrived on flagship phones.

UFS 3.0 is designed for giving support to new high-density NADA memories and facilitate smarter and latest interconnects between the processor and the memory for getting an ultra-fast and more reliable communication.

All in all, Universal Flash Storage 3.0 could have almost twice data bandwidth and use less power. In addition, it can endure a large temperature range (-40 ° Celcius to 105° Celcius). This capability makes them better for automotive applications.

Importantly, UFS 3.0 supports several RPMBs with multiple RPMB keys. RPMBs are physical partitions which are responsible for storing important data such as DRM content protection keys, billing information, etc.

UFS and eMMC 5.1, which one is better?

eMMC stands for embedded multimedia card, it is an older storage solution for your devices such as tablets, smartphones, consumer electronics, and other computing devices. If we talk about UFS, it is the latest technology for storage. It offers sequential read, sequential write, random write, and random read at very high speed.

UFS claimed that it is better than than the eMMC in terms of performance. And the reasons for that include:

• UFS is able to write and read simultaneously.
• It handles multiple commands at the same time and tasks can be reordered accordingly.

UFS 2.1 vs UFS 3.0 regarding speed

Theoretically, UFS 3.0 would raise speed by twice compared with UFS 2.1, which means the transfer speed as high as 11.6 GB per second per lane. Additionally, since there are two channels, the speed can go up to 23,756.8 Mbps (23.2 Gbps). But in the real world, we could only think about the speed of nearly 15 Gbps.

Moreover, these channels of communication between the storage and processor will be made quite better to carry consistent application workload because of the extra Quality of Service (QoS) feature. These chips are designed to reduce power consumption in the device and make it easy to handle a high range of temperature. Only because of these chips, you can easily do 4K videography and also 8K videography without facing too many difficulties.

UFS 3.0 storage speed test speed of OnePlus 7 Pro and Galaxy Note 10 Plus

There are many phones available in the market offering the latest storage chip 3.0. Here we have two phones OnePlus 7 Pro (left) and Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ (right). Let's see how much difference there is between their performances.

After the test, it was found that the effect isn't notable in every situation. But if we talk about writing or reading a large amount of information from or to the storage such as transferring large folders or files between the two devices. 3.0 chips are faster than the eMMC chips.

Keep in mind that not all UFS 3.0 enable smartphone are the same. Here, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ is a little bit quicker in comparison to OnePlus 7 Pro. (As shown in the above comparison).