Samsung Develops the First 1TB Storage Chips For Phones (engadget.com)

Samsung has started mass producing what it says is the industry's first one terabyte embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) technology for smartphones. "It will give the company's mobile devices PC-like storage without the need for large-capacity microSD cards," Engadget reports. "It'll be incredibly useful if you use your phone to take tons of photos and HD videos -- Samsung says it's enough to store 260 10-minute videos in 4K UHD." From the report: "The 1TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing a more notebook-like user experience to the next generation of mobile devices," said Cheol Choi, EVP of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. As ZDNet notes, Samsung's upcoming flagship devices, such as the S10, will most likely come with a 1TB option thanks to its new eUFS technology. After all, Samsung started mass producing its 512GB storage technology back in December 2017 and then debuted it with its new phones early on in the following year.

In addition to offering massive storage, the new eUFS was also designed to be faster than typical SSDs, microSDs and previous revisions of the technology. It has a 1,000-megabyte-per-second sequential read speed, twice that of the usual SSD and faster than its 512GB predecessor. Despite all those, Samsung says it'll come in the same package size as its 512GB flash memory, so it won't have to make its big phones even bigger.

Comments

QLC?

[mentil]

No mention in the press release if this is QLC (quad-level cell) or TLC. It's said that next-gen v-nand tech is responsible for doubling the density, although they generally increase the number of layers by 30% or so each generation, and the chip size is the same. Could be that the 16 layers is double the number their 512GB chip used, although 16 has been the upper limit for years.

QLC would actually be fine for most smartphone users, who only use a tiny portion of the storage anyway, and wouldn't even get close to the ~1,000 rewrite limit (1 petabyte of writes, here). That'll help bring NAND prices down for the enthusiasts who could utilize the higher speed/endurance of TLC.

Re:QLC?

[mentil]

I should clarify that V-NAND is stacked say 64 layers deep on one die, and that up to 16 dies can be stacked for one chip. So there's stacking on top of stacking. More dies on a chip tends to lower the speed, thus why they don't always use the max of 16 dies. Density improvements have been coming from adding more V-NAND layers, Samsung started making 96 layer dies last July, and Hynix is working on 128.