Thraktor
"[✄]. [✄]. [✄]. [✄]." -Microsoft
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I was looking at some phone reviews, and I'm increasingly convinced that UFS 2.1/2.2 at around 850MB/s is a reasonable baseline to expect for internal storage for [redacted]. My reasoning for this is pretty simple; almost every phone released in the past couple of years with slower storage than that has been limited by the SoC, not the storage itself.
The data for this all comes from Notebookcheck's phone benchmark database, which includes storage benchmark results going back quite a few years, with SoC and storage type data. They may not have every phone, but with around 100 phone reviews a year covering entry-level to high-end, it's easily the largest and most representative dataset. I've noticed a couple of labelling errors (UFS labelled as eMMC and vice versa), but these are typically pretty obvious.
First observation: not a single phone released in the last year with eMMC has used an SoC with UFS support. In every case eMMC was the only option for internal storage given the SoC the manufacturer chose.
There have been a few phones released with eMMC over the past year, all of which used SoCs which only support eMMC. A few months ago, the Moto G12, Moto G23 and Xiaomi Redmi 12C all launched with 128GB of eMMC, and all hit around 280MB/s read speeds, which is pretty typical for eMMC. They also all use Mediatek's Helio G85 SoC, which is a 12nm mid-range SoC from 2020 which doesn't support UFS. There are a handful of others with either old Mediatek SoCs or UNISOC SoCs, which again only support eMMC.
Even looking back two or three years, there are very few cases of phone manufacturers using eMMC when not limited by the SoC. The Nokia G21, released a year and a half ago, used 64GB of eMMC with the UNISOC T606, which supports UFS, however the G22 which replaced it a couple of months ago switched to UFS with the same T606 SoC. Similarly the Samsung Galaxy A13 5G used 64GB of eMMC with the Dimensity 700 SoC, whereas the newer Galaxy A14 5G uses the same Dimensity 700 and switched to UFS 2.2.
This tells me two things. Firstly, that eMMC isn't significantly cheaper than UFS, as if it was at least some manufacturers would use it given the option. Secondly, and arguably more importantly for Nintendo, that when those old SoCs which don't support UFS stop being manufactured, eMMC will effectively cease to be used in smartphones. If Nintendo want to keep selling [redacted] for 6 or 7 years they'll need to be able to keep buying parts for it, and if eMMC stops being used in smartphones then availability of parts will drop and there's a significant risk of it simply not being available for Nintendo, or them having to pay excessive amounts to keep it in production.
This isn't necessarily some far-off eventuality, either, it's entirely possible that the smartphone industry will have stopped using eMMC by the time [redacted] launches. If you think about why the Moto G12, G23 and Redmi 12C all appeared with a 3 year old 12nm SoC in a very similar time frame, it's not hard to guess why this is when you consider that they would have all started development when the chip shortage was in full flow. With the chip shortage well and truly over, there's very little reason for any phone currently in development to use such an old SoC, with newer alternatives manufactured on more efficient processes (and featuring UFS support).
Second observation: almost all phones with UFS 2.1/2.2 and speeds less than around 850MB/s are limited by the SoC operating in single-lane mode, not the UFS chip. Single-lane UFS chips don't seem to exist.
If you look through Notebookcheck's benchmarks for UFS 2.1/2.2 results, you'll see two broad groups of phones, ones which hit 850MB/s to 1GB/s and ones which hit around 500MB/s. Furthermore, you'll notice that all the phones which hit around 500MB/s use the same SoCs, like the Snapdragon 695 5G, Snapdragon 480 Plus, Helio G95, etc. Although Qualcomm and Mediatek don't publish the number of UFS lanes supported by their SoCs, it's a pretty safe guess that these chips only support single-lane UFS operation, given speeds of around 500MB/s are the limit of what you can get from single-lane UFS 2.1/2.2.
Furthermore, I don't think they're using single-lane UFS chips, because I don't think they exist. Samsung, who I believe are the largest UFS supplier, list only dual-lane parts in their UFS 2.x parts catalog. Kioxia list both of their current UFS 2.1 parts as supporting data rates of 1160MB/s, meaning dual-lane. SK Hynix doesn't seem to explicitly list the number of lanes supported by their UFS modules, but their product PDF for their newer 176-layer parts (here) lists only one part code for each capacity for UFS 2.2, and advertises 900MB/s or higher read speeds for them all, indicating they're all dual-lane parts. Micron doesn't list the number of lanes either, but they do list details like IOPS, so if there were both single-lane and dual-lane parts in there I would be very surprised if they didn't consider it important enough to distinguish between the two. They also only list one part per capacity for UFS 2.2.
This indicates that almost all UFS 2.1/2.2 parts are capable of 850MB/s+ sequential reads. If we exclude phones where the SoC is limited to single-lane mode, almost all UFS 2.1/2.2 results are between 850MB/s and 1GB/s, with only a handful of outliers below that. Smartphone SoCs which only support single-lane mode do so because Qualcomm and Mediatek want to up-sell to higher-end chips, and limiting storage performance on entry-level and mid-range chips is an easy way to do that. Nintendo and Nvidia have designed T239 specifically for [redacted], so there's no reason for them to intentionally hobble storage performance by only supporting single-lane UFS, when the chips they're buying would be capable of much higher speeds.
So, eMMC appears to be both not significantly cheaper than UFS, and would risk availability issues almost immediately. Meanwhile, unless Nintendo and Nvidia intentionally shoot themselves in the foot by only supporting single-lane mode, the baseline UFS sequential read speeds they can expect are around 850MB/s.
The data for this all comes from Notebookcheck's phone benchmark database, which includes storage benchmark results going back quite a few years, with SoC and storage type data. They may not have every phone, but with around 100 phone reviews a year covering entry-level to high-end, it's easily the largest and most representative dataset. I've noticed a couple of labelling errors (UFS labelled as eMMC and vice versa), but these are typically pretty obvious.
First observation: not a single phone released in the last year with eMMC has used an SoC with UFS support. In every case eMMC was the only option for internal storage given the SoC the manufacturer chose.
There have been a few phones released with eMMC over the past year, all of which used SoCs which only support eMMC. A few months ago, the Moto G12, Moto G23 and Xiaomi Redmi 12C all launched with 128GB of eMMC, and all hit around 280MB/s read speeds, which is pretty typical for eMMC. They also all use Mediatek's Helio G85 SoC, which is a 12nm mid-range SoC from 2020 which doesn't support UFS. There are a handful of others with either old Mediatek SoCs or UNISOC SoCs, which again only support eMMC.
Even looking back two or three years, there are very few cases of phone manufacturers using eMMC when not limited by the SoC. The Nokia G21, released a year and a half ago, used 64GB of eMMC with the UNISOC T606, which supports UFS, however the G22 which replaced it a couple of months ago switched to UFS with the same T606 SoC. Similarly the Samsung Galaxy A13 5G used 64GB of eMMC with the Dimensity 700 SoC, whereas the newer Galaxy A14 5G uses the same Dimensity 700 and switched to UFS 2.2.
This tells me two things. Firstly, that eMMC isn't significantly cheaper than UFS, as if it was at least some manufacturers would use it given the option. Secondly, and arguably more importantly for Nintendo, that when those old SoCs which don't support UFS stop being manufactured, eMMC will effectively cease to be used in smartphones. If Nintendo want to keep selling [redacted] for 6 or 7 years they'll need to be able to keep buying parts for it, and if eMMC stops being used in smartphones then availability of parts will drop and there's a significant risk of it simply not being available for Nintendo, or them having to pay excessive amounts to keep it in production.
This isn't necessarily some far-off eventuality, either, it's entirely possible that the smartphone industry will have stopped using eMMC by the time [redacted] launches. If you think about why the Moto G12, G23 and Redmi 12C all appeared with a 3 year old 12nm SoC in a very similar time frame, it's not hard to guess why this is when you consider that they would have all started development when the chip shortage was in full flow. With the chip shortage well and truly over, there's very little reason for any phone currently in development to use such an old SoC, with newer alternatives manufactured on more efficient processes (and featuring UFS support).
Second observation: almost all phones with UFS 2.1/2.2 and speeds less than around 850MB/s are limited by the SoC operating in single-lane mode, not the UFS chip. Single-lane UFS chips don't seem to exist.
If you look through Notebookcheck's benchmarks for UFS 2.1/2.2 results, you'll see two broad groups of phones, ones which hit 850MB/s to 1GB/s and ones which hit around 500MB/s. Furthermore, you'll notice that all the phones which hit around 500MB/s use the same SoCs, like the Snapdragon 695 5G, Snapdragon 480 Plus, Helio G95, etc. Although Qualcomm and Mediatek don't publish the number of UFS lanes supported by their SoCs, it's a pretty safe guess that these chips only support single-lane UFS operation, given speeds of around 500MB/s are the limit of what you can get from single-lane UFS 2.1/2.2.
Furthermore, I don't think they're using single-lane UFS chips, because I don't think they exist. Samsung, who I believe are the largest UFS supplier, list only dual-lane parts in their UFS 2.x parts catalog. Kioxia list both of their current UFS 2.1 parts as supporting data rates of 1160MB/s, meaning dual-lane. SK Hynix doesn't seem to explicitly list the number of lanes supported by their UFS modules, but their product PDF for their newer 176-layer parts (here) lists only one part code for each capacity for UFS 2.2, and advertises 900MB/s or higher read speeds for them all, indicating they're all dual-lane parts. Micron doesn't list the number of lanes either, but they do list details like IOPS, so if there were both single-lane and dual-lane parts in there I would be very surprised if they didn't consider it important enough to distinguish between the two. They also only list one part per capacity for UFS 2.2.
This indicates that almost all UFS 2.1/2.2 parts are capable of 850MB/s+ sequential reads. If we exclude phones where the SoC is limited to single-lane mode, almost all UFS 2.1/2.2 results are between 850MB/s and 1GB/s, with only a handful of outliers below that. Smartphone SoCs which only support single-lane mode do so because Qualcomm and Mediatek want to up-sell to higher-end chips, and limiting storage performance on entry-level and mid-range chips is an easy way to do that. Nintendo and Nvidia have designed T239 specifically for [redacted], so there's no reason for them to intentionally hobble storage performance by only supporting single-lane UFS, when the chips they're buying would be capable of much higher speeds.
So, eMMC appears to be both not significantly cheaper than UFS, and would risk availability issues almost immediately. Meanwhile, unless Nintendo and Nvidia intentionally shoot themselves in the foot by only supporting single-lane mode, the baseline UFS sequential read speeds they can expect are around 850MB/s.
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