This next-gen storage format could soon become a reason to upgrade your smartphone – here's why (www.techradar.com)

JEDEC has announced UFS 5.0, the next-generation Universal Flash Storage standard for mobile devices, delivering up to 10.8 GB/s sequential transfer — almost double the ~5.8 GB/s of UFS 4.0. The spec targets AI workloads explicitly, promising higher throughput and improved power efficiency while remaining backward compatible with UFS 4.x hardware. That combination aims to reduce storage I/O bottlenecks without dramatically increasing battery drain. For the AI/ML community this matters because storage is an increasingly critical part of on-device inference and edge ML workflows: faster read/write speeds let phones stream model shards, load large quantized checkpoints, swap memory-backed activations more quickly, and reduce latency for multimodal or multitask pipelines that repeatedly hit flash. UFS 5.0 won’t replace RAM/accelerator memory, but it enables more aggressive model offloading and faster dataset or cache access on resource‑constrained devices. Availability is still unclear — manufacturers haven’t announced phones yet, with Samsung likely to lead adoption while Apple historically avoids UFS — but if widely adopted, UFS 5.0 could become a practical hardware differentiator for AI-capable smartphones.