JEDEC finalizes UFS 5.0 with 10.8 GB/s for on-device AI

JEDEC, the industry body that sets standards for flash storage, has finalized the next generation Universal Flash Storage format, UFS 5.0, announcing a major increase in storage throughput and a package of technical improvements aimed at supporting on-device artificial intelligence. The standard, announced this week, delivers sequential performance of up to 10.8 gigabytes per second and is designed to be both more power efficient and backwards compatible with existing UFS 4.x hardware.

JEDEC said UFS 5.0 nearly doubles sequential bandwidth compared with the current UFS 4.x generation, a jump the organization framed as necessary to meet growing demands for real-time AI processing, edge computing and increasingly large, data-intensive mobile applications. The standard includes several engineering changes intended to improve signal stability and data integrity, including integrated link equalization for noise isolation, a dedicated supply rail to separate noise between physical and memory layers, and support for inline hashing to protect user data.

In practical terms, vendors and device makers expect the higher throughput and lower latency to benefit tasks that move large volumes...