Samsung Just Killed The Micro Sd Card And This Is What Will Replace It

Samsung and SanDisk are looking to one-up each other when it comes to expandable memory for smartphones and any other device that supports a microSD card. SanDisk made a 200GB card last year that is quite affordable, and then Samsung came up with a 256GB model.

A few weeks ago, SanDisk matched Samsung’s 256GB card with two new microSD options of its own , both more affordable than Samsung’s card. But Samsung stepped up its game and killed the microSD card completely.

The company’s latest memory offering is a UFS 2.0 storage solution that will work with any device that has microSDXC support, but it offers the same lightning-fast storage experience as the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S7. In fact, these new cards are just as fast as SSD drives.

Samsung last year switched to UFS 2.0 storage for high-end mobile devices , with the Galaxy S6 being the first to get these new ultra-fast memory chips. Short for Universal Flash Storage, UFS can significantly improve the smartphone experience, allowing faster access to the contents of a phone. Expanding UFS 2.0 support to swappable cards seems only logical for Samsung, and the move would let diehard Android fans to take advantage of Android’s adoptable storage feature – here’s how to enable it on the Galaxy S7 .

Oddly enough, Samsung does not mention Android devices in its press release , saying the new memory card has been designed for “mobile shooting devices such as DSLRs, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones.” Samsung did not announce actual release dates or pricing details for the UFS 2.0 memory cards either, but it did reveal performance details.

The cards offer “more than five times faster sequential read performance compared to that of a typical microSD card,” as they’re able to read sequentially at 530 MB/s, which is on par with SSD sequential read speeds.

“With this UFS card, consumers have the ability to read a 5GB, Full-HD movie in approximately 10 seconds, compared to a typical UHS-1 microSD card, which would take over 50 seconds with 95MB/s of sequential reading speed,” Samsung writes. “Also, at a random read rate of 40,000 IOPS, the 256GB card delivers more than 20 times higher random read performance compared to a typical microSD, which offers approximately 1,800 IOPS.”

UFS cards will read a 5GB Full HD movie in 10 seconds, compared to 50 seconds for a microSD card that can do up to 95MB/s sequential reading.

As for write speeds, the 256GB UFS card reaches a top speed of 170MB/s, or almost twice the speeds the fastest microSD card can achieve. “To shoot 24 large/extra fine JPEG photographs (1,120 megabyte (MB)-equivalent) continuously with a high-end DSLR camera, the 256GB UFS card takes less than seven seconds, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which typically takes about 32 seconds, at 35MB/s,” Samsung explains.

Well, SanDisk, the ball is in your court now.

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Moore’s law scaling dead by 2021, to be replaced by 3D integration

Over the past few years, we’ve chronicled the transformation of Moore’s Law. Originally coined as a way to explain ongoing improvements in transistor scaling, Moore’s law has been redefined and extended to include long-term trends in semiconductor performance and the integration of new chip features. Now, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) has released a new update on the future of semiconductor technology that states conventional 2D transistor density scaling will likely end by 2021 — to be replaced by new and different types of integration and scaling.

Much of the ITRS’ recently released executive report focuses on the way the meaning of Moore’s law has changed over the years. We discussed this back in 2015 when we noted the need for a Moore’s law 3.0, as the focus of the semiconductor industry shifted from shrinking individual chips to an SoC or device-centric model, which emphasized capability integration and power consumption reductions. The modern cell phone is an example of this third type of integration, which combines a high-definition screen, high-speed cellular and wireless network, a touchscreen interface, high-quality cameras capable of capturing both photos and video, a short-range flashlight (thanks to an integrated flash), and 16-128GB of internal storage. All of this capability is combined with a high-speed system-on-chip that operates well above 1GHz.

The benefits of 3D stacking.

The shift from 2D to 3D structures is going to be much simpler for some technologies than others. One of the major challenges of adopting 3D construction for logic circuits, like CPUs, is that stacking memory transistors on top of logic transistors could melt one or both layers if too much heat is trapped within the die. We’ve already seen NAND flash make the shift to 3D manufacturing, but 3D CPUs aren’t expected until the 2021 – 2024 timeframe. Between now and then, manufacturers are expected to integrate other materials, like silicon-germanium (SiGe) or III-V semiconductors (semiconductors from groups III and V of the periodic table) to improve on current performance.



One point the ITRS reiterated that we’ve also covered before at ET is that the nature of what constitutes advancement and how we characterize that performance improvement will continue to emphasize low power over strict clock advances. This is partly due to the nature of what the market is demanding, and partly due to the limited ability of current materials to hit higher clock rates. As the graph above shows, only van der Waal FETs are expected to even match high-power CMOS in terms of absolute performance, albeit at significantly reduced power consumption. In thermally constrained environments, the vdWFETs and exFETs are significantly faster when constrained to a power envelope of 10W/cm².

One alternative floated by the ITRS is that we may see improvements in the usage of highly specialized heterogeneous cores that utilize either unique function blocks or are highly tuned to particular applications. This has been a proposed solution to the so-called dark silicon problem that we’ve covered before, and it’s relatively easy to explain. Instead of building multi-core blocks with an increasing number of similar chips, manufacturers would use some of that space to build processors dedicated to specific tasks. Conceptually, this would mean that your camera might have one dedicated processor, while other applications could run on other cores. Some research projects have explored building small cores to handle tasks at an application level, but the ITRS report doesn’t delve into this detail.

Here’s how NAND and DRAM compare across a variety of metrics. Image included mostly for being interesting.

One point that the ITRS report makes, but doesn’t necessarily come right out and say, is that we’re going to see this kind of integration and envelope-pushing in the heart of IoT development before it comes to desktops, laptops, and the like. The reason is simple, and as inferred above: Right now, the silicon industry is pushing hard to create chips that can run on less and less power while simultaneously improving power consumption. If you want to build a next-generation wearable, cutting power consumption from 1W to 0.75W is a huge improvement. But the technologies that allow you to cut that 0.25W of power may not translate well to devices in the 15W-140W laptop and desktop range. Similarly, building 3D chips with integrated CPUs requires appropriate thermal dissipation, which means the first chips to rely on these methods will probably be extremely low-power devices — not the kind of cores in your laptop or desktop.

In fact, it’s somewhat telling that while the ITRS’ executive summary makes extensive predictions regarding future device frequencies, bandwidths, and operating characteristics at the data center, mobile, and Internet of Everything (the proposed successor to the Internet of Things), it does not attempt to predict the future of conventional desktops and laptops. The closest it comes is predicting that by 2029 the average mobile processor will contain 25 application processors and 303 GPU cores, with a max single-component frequency of 4.7GHz (presumably burst frequency).

The implications of the report are clear: Those who seek significantly improved CPU performance will do best to seek it via new computing architectures, improved multi-threading, or improved memory performance in general — not via improvements to raw clock speed. With Intel stuck in the doldrums when it comes to providing architectural improvements, we wouldn’t hold our breath on this front.

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Japan’s SoftBank offers ARM a $32 billion buyout

UK-based ARM Holdings has dominated the cell phone industry for decades, with an estimated 50 billion ARM processors built by the year 2014. Now the company has been acquired by Japan’s SoftBank in a deal worth $32 billion (£24.3 billion). ARM will retain its Cambridge, UK headquarters and SoftBank has pledged to double the company’s headcount over the next five years. SoftBank has also stated it intends to retain ARM’s existing senior management, brand, and partnership-based business model and culture.
On the one hand, this looks like it could be a huge win for ARM, which gets a vast boost in resources and capabilities. SoftBank is offering a 50% premium on ARM’s current share price, which makes the deal a great option for shareholders, and SoftBank owns other technology companies that might benefit from closer relationships with ARM.
On the other hand, those closer relationships could also become a significant problem for ARM’s business model.

Tenuous neutrality

ARM dominates the mobile and embedded industries partly because it operates a tiered business model that doesn’t prioritize any single customer. ARM doesn’t sell finished CPUs the way that Intel or AMD does. Instead, it offers multiple types of design and product licensing. Customers who want a complete, standardized solution can license a specific CPU, GPU, or other ARM product. AMD’s Seattle, for example, is based on ARM’s Cortex-A57 processor and built on 28nm technology.

Graph by Recode

ARM’s other major license tier is an architectural license. Let’s say you want to build a chip that’s ARMv8 compatible, but designed to your own specifications. ARM’s business model allows for this. All of Apple’s current products are based on its own custom implementation of ARM’s CPU architecture, as are Qualcomm’s Krait and Kryo-based SoCs. By offering these two licenses’ ARM has cultivated a position as the neutral performance provider to anyone who wants it.

SoftBank, on the other hand, already owns one US wireless carrier (Sprint) and another in Japan. Carriers don’t design their own devices, but it’s not hard to see how SoftBank might be interested in pairing with another company to create a Sprint-specific device that leveraged its own custom silicon. Any such product could disrupt the balance ARM has maintained for years. Over at PCMag, Sascha Segan has delved into more detail on how this could change the mobile market. Recode is reporting that Apple and Intel might be interested in buying ARM as well, but an acquisition by either company would create an enormous and immediate conflict of interest in a way that SoftBank’s wouldn’t. Apple already captures the vast majority of profit in the smartphone business (Samsung scrapes up most of what’s left) and Intel just announced its intent to exit smartphones and tablets. Any move by Apple or Intel to acquire ARM would almost certainly trigger a great deal of scrutiny from government regulators, since any significant change to ARM’s license model could disrupt the entire wireless industry.

The SoftBank acquisition isn’t expected to change anything in the smartphone industry in the short term and any movement away from ARM designs would take years to come to fruition. Imagination Technologies might be salivating at the thought of a resurgent MIPS, but ecosystems take time to build. Given that ARM is an attractive acquisition target because of its position at the center of the mobile Internet, SoftBank is unlikely to make any changes that would upset this status quo

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Hackers claim DDoS knocked Pokémon GO offline last weekend

Pokémon GO has been an unbridled success since it launched about two weeks ago, and that comes amid sometimes crippling server issues. Developer Niantic was forced to slow its global rollout so it could add server capacity, and there are still some days that the game just won’t connect. This past weekend was particularly bad, and now a hacking group called OurMine is claiming responsibility for the downtime.

If you have not heard of Pokémon GO, I can only assume you’ve been living under a rock sans internet access for the last few weeks. Announced last year, the game grew out of a 2014 April Fools prank at Google that scattered all the original 151 Pokémon around Google Maps. It was a big hit, and Niantic (owned by Google at the time) started working with The Pokémon Company to make it into a real game.

Pokémon GO lets you wander the real world, hunting Pokémon and locating gyms in which to do battle.
The number of people playing the game is almost beyond belief — you’ll encounter people out playing the game almost everywhere. Niantic rolled the game out to 26 additional countries over the weekend, which many blamed for the problems. The game was inaccessible most of Saturday, throwing up server errors whenever most players tried to connect. OurMine says it carried out a DDoS attack on Niantic’s servers, and that was to blame for the outage, not an influx of new players.



According to a representative of OurMine, the group only wants to “protect” Niantic’s servers. So, obviously the best way is to flood them with traffic and ruin everyone’s Saturday. OurMine says it will stop attacking Pokémon GO if someone from Niantic contacts the group so they can “teach them how to protect their servers.” That does not seem likely to happen. This situation is very reminiscent of the Lizard Squad hacks of several years ago that targeted popular gaming services like Xbox Live and PSN.

So what now? Since it’s not likely Niantic’s engineers are going to come crawling to some internet pranksters for security tips, the attacks will probably continue until they get bored. A separate group, PoodleCorp, says it has a Pokémon GO DDoS scheduled for August 1st. Hopefully Niantic can at least get its regular server load under control before it’s hit again. You might want to get working on catching ’em all now just in case.

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SpaceX sends major science payload to the ISS

SpaceX has now made five successful rocket landings. As part of the ninth Commercial Resupply Services flight, the SpaceX team recovered a booster from a successful launch Monday — the second stage touched down, in accordance with the mission plan, at 12:53 AM EDT. CRS-9 is due at the ISS on Wednesday morning, with a several-ton payload of supplies and experiments in tow. Dragon is also bringing an international docking adapter which will make it easier for future manned missions to dock with the ISS. This includes future crewed Dragon flights, as well as the Boeing Starliner. While CRS missions aren’t manned (yet!), that doesn’t mean today’s mission didn’t bring any life to the party. This time, in addition to the crew supplies and science hardware, the CRS-9 flight will bring microbes from Chernobyl to the International Space Station.

Much of the science payload is equipment to be tested, including a machine for testing whether we can sequence DNA in microgravity. It’s not that we think it’s impossible — DNA sequencing just requires electrical current, but the way we currently do sequencing also relies on Earth’s familiar gravity, so we need another method if we’re going to do sequencing in space. There’s also an experiment called OsteoOmics that looks at which genes are transcribed in bone that’s been kept in mag-lev weightlessness on Earth versus bone cells kept in freefall weightlessness, which is what occurs aboard Station.

NASA also sent up a phase-change heat exchanger that they’re alpha testing. It could make heating and cooling in space easier by providing thermal inertia. The test build will compare water and wax to see which works better.  Wax’s thermal properties and overclocking potential has actually been explored for use in smartphones and other technology platforms, though we’ve yet to see shipping systems that used the technique.

The fungus comes from locations within and around the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl. Originally gathered by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as part of a different experiment, these eight species have been living in culture, so they aren’t themselves radioactive. But two of the species, Cladosporium sphaerospermum and C. cladosporioides, actually seem to have a taste for radiation. They grow toward it with a decisive preference.

Cladosporium cladosporioides, one of the fungi 

from Chernobyl that’s heading into space. Image: Medmyco via Wikimedia Commons

Clay Wang and colleagues hope the radiophilic microbes will provide some clue that will help humans survive in space. These special-snowflake fungi have many tactics that they employ to soak up and mitigate the dose of radiation they receive, including producing a lot of melanin, which can scavenge free radicals from the ambient fluid bath.

While the radiation environment aboard the ISS station is nothing like the radiocontamination surrounding the ruined nuclear plant, astronauts still experience elevated levels of radiation exposure while they’re in space. Wang hopes that the elevated dose will convince these fungi to start showing off their repertoire of radiation compensation tricks, explaining to Popular Science, “Microorganisms only make certain things when they need to. We want to see if they actually make new compounds in space.”

“From an overall perspective, this is just part of the rich stream of research going on on the space station, from human research, biology, physical sciences investigations and things for exploration technology,” said Julie Robinson, chief ISS program scientist, during a briefing Saturday. Falcon 9 is due back from the ISS in about a month, and we’ll keep you updated on its next endeavors.

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