Local AI models tend to run a lot more slowly than cloud services like Claude and Gemini; however, Samsung has just announced that it has developed its UFS 5.0 solution, which increases data transfer to speeds of 10.8GB/s, enabling faster storage and processing in mobile memory that has the potential to provide more optimal local AI experiences.
Commenting on this development, Jangseok Choi, head of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, said:
“In the era of on-device AI, storage devices are evolving into a key driver defining AI experiences. 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.”
If you’ve tried local AI, you’ll know it can be quite slow, especially if using the larger parameter models. By developing this new solution, Samsung says that storage is evolving from just storing data to a core piece of infrastructure that supports AI computation, too.
The Korean company said that UFS 5.0 integrates the latest embedded memory interface standard from JEDEC and achieves up to 10.8 gigabytes per second (GB/s) transfer speeds. Regarding write speeds, Samsung UFS 5.0 can reach 9.5 GB/s. Both the read and write speeds are twice as fast as those of the previous UFS 4.1 standard.
Aside from being ideal for local AI, Samsung’s UFS 5.0 is more power efficient promising to be 40% better compared to UFS 4.1. Samsung achieved this by implementing innovations such as clock gating and multi-voltage technologies. UFS 5.0 is also ultra-compact at just 7.5mm x 13mm x 0.9mm; that is 16.7% smaller than UFS 4.1.
The company said it will be bringing it to multiple devices in the future, including mobile, wearable, and extended reality.