UFS 5.0: New flash memory to be almost twice as fast as UFS 4.0

The industry association JEDEC, short for “Joint Electron Device Engineering Council,” intends to finalize the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 5.0 storage standard in the near future. Compared to its predecessor, UFS 4.0, the new version should offer more performance for mobile devices, edge computing, automotive, and gaming consoles, while suitable controllers should remain backwards compatible with older UFS versions.

Almost twice as fast as UFS 4.0

According to JEDEC, UFS 5.0 should deliver a sequential performance of up to 10.8 GByte/s, which is roughly double the speed of UFS 4.0. Although the new flash memory is therefore considerably faster, UFS 5.0 does not yet come close to current SSDs with PCIe 5.0 such as Samsung's 9100 Pro, which is said to deliver up to 14.8 GB/s. JEDEC explains that the new speed boost is intended to meet the requirements of AI, which benefit from high throughput rates. However, fast RAM plays a greater role in AI tasks that are performed on devices.

According to the announcement, another new feature of UFS 5.0 is “Integrated Link Equalization for more reliable signal integrity,” which is intended to make the memory more reliable. The process is designed to prevent signal degradation by reducing frequency dependencies and noise. Furthermore, the memory can be more easily integrated into systems by providing a separate power supply for the signal unit and memory subsystem, which should reduce electrical noise between the components.

For greater data security, JEDEC uses “inline hashing” with UFS 5.0. The hash values are automatically generated during data processing without the need for a separate process step. In this way, the number of memory accesses can be reduced and latency improved.

Cooperation with the MIPI Alliance

Unlike the widely used NVMe SSDs, UFS does not use PCI Express for data transfers. According to JEDEC, most of the new features of UFS 5.0 are the result of the cooperation with the MIPI Alliance (Mobile Industry Processor Interface Alliance). Instead, JEDEC relies on the so-called M-PHY protocol of the MIPI Alliance. With M-PHY 6.0, UFS 5.0 brings a new “High-Speed Gear 6 (HS-G6),” “which supports data rates twice as high as the previous maximum data rate of HS-G5”. It enables a UFS interface bandwidth of 46.6 gigabits per second per lane. With UFS 5.0, two lanes enable an effective read/write speed of up to 10.8 GByte/s (protocol overhead already deducted), according to JEDEC.

It will probably be a while before the new flash memory standard is used in the first devices. JEDEC has not yet provided any information on availability, but a leaked presentation slide from Samsung indicates that the first UFS 5.0 storage devices will be available in 2027.

(afl)