February 25, 2016

Memory chip that supercharges smartphones and smashes performance of PCs despite tiny size unveiled by Samsung.

The Korean electronics company’s new 256-gigabyte (GB) embedded memory chip will rev up the next generation of high-end mobile devices by providing high capacity storage at PC-beating performance levels all within a compact design that’s smaller than micro SD memory cards.

How fast?

This new card can transfer (read) data at speeds of up to 850MB/s – that’s nearly as fast as a typical hard drive found in PCs, laptops and ultrabooks.

And it’s up to three times as fast as high-performance external micro SD memory cards in terms of how fast data is written/stored with a performance of up to 260MB/s.

A new mobile world – store dozens of HD movies

Such performance means that this card can support seamless Ultra HD video playback and multi-tasking on large screen mobile devices, such as watching 4K Ultra HD movies on a split screen while searching image files or downloading video clips.

With 256GB of capacity, you can store around 47 full HD movies, according to Samsung.

And in combination with smartphones with the USB 3.0 interface, it will take just 12 seconds to transfer a 5GB full HD video clip (average 90-minute movie size).

The memory chips are even smaller than the size of a micro SD card, which themselves are about the size of a finger nail.

Technical details

Samsung will be mass producing the industry’s first 256GB embedded memory based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard. It’s performance for mobile devices out paces that of a typical SATA-based SSD for PCs.

A PC slayer?

With tumbling sales of PCs for the past four years, ever improving performance of smartphones could be the final nail in the coffin.

Perhaps in the future, it will be a case of hooking up your smartphone to a large monitor and Bluetooth keyboard with no need for any other computer.

Sales of PCs were down by up to 10.4 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year, according to analysts.