Samsung Starts Producing Power Efficient Memory Chips for Next-Gen Flagship Phones

Samsung today announced its new memory chips for mobile devices. The firm has started mass producing its new mobile memory chips, just in time for the upcoming flagship phones coming later this year and early 2019.

The company has built the 2nd-generation of 10nm LPDDR4X DRAM without compromising power usage — in fact, it uses 10% less power than the first generation, while continuing to produce data transfer speeds of 4,266 MB/s. The new package combines four of the company’s 10nm 16GB LPDDR4X DRAM chips that each produce a data rate of 34.1GB per second. Samsung has even managed to reduce the thickness of the modules by 20% as compared to the first generation.

That’s a lot of technicalities, but what does it mean for you, the end user? The improved power usage will mostly help with battery life, so your next phone could last longer, even when dealing with intense workloads. “The advent of 10nm-class mobile DRAM will enable significantly enhanced solutions for next-generation, flagship mobile devices that should first hit the market late this year or the first part of 2019,” said Samsung’s Seown Chun, an SVP of Memory Sales and Marketing. Chun is probably hinting at the company’s upcoming Galaxy S10 device here.

Don’t expect a huge bump on performance, or even a major improvement in battery life, though — the improved power efficiency of the memory will likely be used up by other components, like a larger display, or a beefier processor, for example. There are a lot of variables that contribute to the overall battery life of any hardware, and even though improved power efficiency for memory chips will help with achieving better battery life, it’s not enough to result in an overall boost in your device’s performance.

Either way, Samsung will most likely make use of its new memory chips on the next Galaxy S flagship, and we should start seeing the chips on devices from other manufacturers that use Samsung’s memory chips.