Comments Locked

42 Comments

Back to Article

  • jeffkibuule - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    Those write speeds look really great, but without USB 3.0 which almost no phones actually support, it seems like a real waste.

    Are most smartphone OEMs waiting for USB Type-C connectors to roll out USB 3.x support because the micro USB 3.0 connector looks so kludgy?
  • willis936 - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    Lessening the chugginess on mobile devices hardly seems "like a real waste".
  • Mikemk - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    I fail to see why you need USB 3 for the internal drive.
  • SleepyFE - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    To copy/paste from/to PC.
  • wolrah - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    That's not why the speed matters. The local apps using the storage and it not being fast enough is why it matters. A speed increase in transfers from your PC is just a side benefit.
  • SleepyFE - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    He asked why you need USB 3. I answered.
  • cygnus1 - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    There are important uses for more storage performance that have nothing to do with moving data on and off the phone through a USB port: keeping up with a decent 802.11ac connection for downloading music or video or other files; and being able to record from onboard cameras and other sensors faster allows for higher resolution, frame rates, etc
  • SleepyFE - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    I call bullshit. Any flash solution is faster than an HDD. A PC with an HDD will handle everything you said just fine.
  • mkozakewich - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    I get the feeling most PCs do a lot of caching to RAM.

    Also, most PCs don't record 4K video.
  • SleepyFE - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    Phones have RAM as well, maybe they should just put more RAM in phones. Problem solved. And most phones also don't record 4K video.
  • frenchy_2001 - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    Most year old flag ships phone can already record 4k video. My Galaxy note3 can already for example (not that I would use that, I'm usually recording 720p for storage/quality trade offs).

    Moreover, this is a bit of a non announcement. The only new thing is command queuing. Otherwise, eMMC 5.0 supported a 400MB/s interface. The current speed limitation is the NAND itself, as adding parallelism in a single package is difficult (NAND are rather slow, what makes SSD fast is multiple NAND channels).
  • SleepyFE - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_note_3-5665...
    It says here that you can take 4K pics but video is 2160p30 max. So 4K video is still a no go. Also flagships are not most phones, so most people won't be doing that.

    You are right about multichannel controllers though. But since one channel flash is still faster than HDD my previous statement still stands. I WANT MORE RAM.
  • Azured - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    2160p is 4k
  • psh99527 - Thursday, February 19, 2015 - link

    There are too many people like you who pollute the internet with misleading information. 4K is 4096 x 2160, and no, there is no such thing as one channel flash. Why do you need more RAM? What device do you own? I'm assuming you'd need more megapixels on your phone and more screen resolution too?
  • Uplink10 - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    Phones already have so much RAM, they could run Windows 8.1, if the processor was x86.
  • romesh - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    Not so.. read about ufs 2.0, emmc lacks many standard feaures for hdd/ssd like command queuing and simultaneous read/write
  • extide - Thursday, February 19, 2015 - link

    Not neccesarily. Sure, in random workloads, but small flash solutions like this tend to have fairly low sequential speeds, and a modern HDD is pretty dang fast at sequential, and all of the above workloads would imply sequential writes, of which this can only do 90MB/sec and this is the BEST eMMC you can get. Pretty much ANY HD from even a while ago will be able to do ~120-150+MB/sec in sequential writes..
  • tipoo - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    That makes little sense. Internal NAND performance is still tantamount to a good smartphone experience, from loading apps, moving around the OS, etc. USB 3 would be nice for file transfers from a computer, but the internal speed is still very important.
  • SleepyFE - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    The worst part is that the mini USB type B already exists but is not used. Unlike the micro USB type B its 3.0 version does not fit into a 2.0 socked and vice versa. But it is the same size as the 2.0 version which is also the size of a type C, it's just not reversible.
  • danjw - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    Samsung Galaxy S 5 has a USB 3.0 port. I am pretty sure there are others as well.

    Also, as others have stated with MIMO 802.11ac actually available on phones today, throughput on the storage of a device does matter.
  • Cellar Door - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    A nice evolutionary step. Basically trying to eliminate bottlenecks in overall operation.

    Still, with the mobile market moving forward so quickly, this seems more of a step to pump out small changes to fuel sales.
  • eanazag - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    It's both. This will allow Samsung to differentiate in the Android space. They can claim to have the fastest storage system in mobile.
  • WorldWithoutMadness - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    LOL, fastest storage system in mobile doesn't really translate with UI snappiness.
    They'd better redo their UI from scratch first.
    But oh well, it seems other oem can benefit from these.
  • Stochastic - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    What are the biggest bottlenecks affecting subjective snappiness/responsiveness of smartphones today? Are we mostly SoC limited or is storage a big bottleneck as it is with traditional PCs?
  • willis936 - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    Even moreso in mobile. Look at those IOPS numbers. Those only go one direction over time and getting grabage collection smoothed out all the way down the stack has been taking a while just like it did with AHCI except here there's no high performance controller pulling half a watt just to make the storage faster. When an app takes an extra second to load or things feel chuggy when swiping around it's the storage that's doing that, not the soc.
  • SleepyFE - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    Well that's not true. I have a cortex-A5 with no GPU and my father has a cortex-A9 and PowerVR sgx531. Mine is chuggy while his is not. Since eMMC 5.1 just came out he isn't benefiting from it so storage not such a big problem as you make it out to be.
  • jjj - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    Those are not small changes , random IOPS gets a major boost (57% and 86%) and command queuing can be a big enough deal if it's smart enough.
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    Dunno why they still keep the random numbers measured in iops rather than MB/s. I know why, performance is so low that this iops in the "thousands" confuse the average customer.

    For 11-13K IOPS its basically 10MB/s
  • pronuncer - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    IOPS is IOs per second. It is not the same thing as data rate, which is measured in MB/s because each IO can have different bytes written/read.
  • mkozakewich - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    13,000 4KB IOPS would be a little more than 50 MB/s, which is actually really good. I have no idea if that's the usual transfer sizes on these, though.
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    Not even the 850 pro with around 80K IOPS reaches 40MB/s in random 4K reads.
  • LukaP - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    80K IOPS at 4K equals 312.5MB/s in bandwith. Its a simple equation really. Bandwith (MB/s) = IOPS*Packet size(4K)/1024. So your claim is wrong. Do research.

    And since this can (on average) do 10K IOPS at 4K that means the bandwith then is 10000*4/1024= 39MB/s
  • jjj - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    Too lazy to look it up , no idea if OS support is needed for whatever is called command queuing here and how smart it actually is.
    I do wonder how much slower the smaller capacity ones are, Samsung is specific about the 64GB version reaching those speeds and that makes it pretty clear that 32GB and 16GB are slower. Few pay an extra 100-200$ for 64GB so the speeds for the smaller ones are far more relevant.
  • jeremybrown82@gmail.com - Tuesday, March 3, 2015 - link

    Isnt the embedded micro controler hardware based, making command queuing os irrevelant?
  • tygrus - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    Samsung phones have suffered slightly from slow (and small) FLASH storage. It's not only the FLASH fault but also the attached controller and interface. The updated 5.1 specs are nice but they should be looking at doubling the numbers not just 30% here and there.
  • mkozakewich - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    You're talking about something the size of a microSD. 5.1 *is* the interface, and the controller is embedded in the same chip. Overall, there's a lot going on. Frankly, the fact that these things are performing better than SSDs from 2009 means a lot.
  • cygnus1 - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link

    There are important uses for more storage performance that have nothing to do with moving data on and off the phone through a USB port: keeping up with a decent 802.11ac connection for downloading music or video or other files; and being able to record from onboard cameras and other sensors faster allows for higher resolution, frame rates, etc
  • Wolfpup - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    Thanks for explaining what "eMMC" means...I've heard the term repeatedly, knew it basically meant "not a real SSD, has worse performance", but didn't realize it was "Embedded MultiMedia Card". Makes sense!

    What's weird, I suppose, is that some of today's eMMC storage seems to perform better than bad SSDs used to!

    I wonder about wear leveling and the like, how eMMC compares with real SSDs...
  • djvita - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    what about UFS-2? its even faster

    this should be on the S6. i think this is the year to upgrade my razr hd, even though the A72 is coming in christmas.
  • semo - Thursday, February 19, 2015 - link

    Yep, UFS is what you want in your phone. SoC features have been getting a disproportionate coverage in reviews and marketing when IO is as important, if not more important than CPU performance when it comes to responsiveness of the UI.
  • Uplink10 - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link

    More important is random read/write and not sequential, I am guessing random is pretty low, that is why they are advertising sequential. Can`t they just put SSD grade chip onto PCB instead of slow eMMC chips.
  • porphyr - Thursday, February 19, 2015 - link

    I'm not sure that emmc uses less performance nand (although it probably does), but there isn't room for many channels of nand, one of the things that makes modern ssds as fast as they are

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now