New MicroSD Standard Comes with PCIe and NVMe

AlphaAtlas

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The SD Association just announced a new microSD standard that should dramatically speed up the flash memory cards. MicroSD Express, as they call it, uses a single lane of PCIe 3.1 and the NVMe 1.3 protocol to hit transfer speeds of up to 985MB/s. While your average consumer NVMe SSD eats far more power than a MicroSD card, the organization claims that the new cards will consume less energy than their predecessors, and promises full backwards compatibility with older interfaces. If all this sounds familiar, that's because the SD Association association introduced the SD Express format last year, adding support for massive storage capacities in the process, and even reused part of thier old promotional video for the MicroSD Express Launch. Thanks to Techcrunch for spotting the report.

Check out the video here.

NVMe can have a dedicated command queue in the DRAM for every CPU core while in other commonly used embedded or removable cards (ie UFS, eMMC and SD) there is a bottle neck of single available queue supported by the host controller interface.
 
Nice.
Wasn't there a manufacturer trying to release a new card standard that's backwards compatible with microSD, Universal Flash Storage?
 
Nice.
Wasn't there a manufacturer trying to release a new card standard that's backwards compatible with microSD, Universal Flash Storage?
That's not how money is made. haha They need to, else the dropping prices would put them out of business (in theory). If things like this wouldn't be changing, all memory would be dirt cheap and we'd all be happy.
 
This should get pretty interesting on a Raspberry Pi. The performance gain will be huge.
 
The cards are capable, but what SD card reader can handle almost 1GB/sec? I think mine tops out at about 50MB/sec.
 
Cool stuff. It's been great seeing the storage sizes get larger and prices drop over the last couple of years. I couldn't believe I was able to get a couple of legit Sandisk 256GB MicroSd's for a phone and tablet for around $50 each.

A new standard for speed is due. Since they're going to be backwards compatible it ought to be interesting if they help the older tech reach better speeds too much like USB 3.0 did for USB 2.0 devices. Looking forward to seeing these and the effect they'll have on various devices from cameras to mobile computing.
 
Imagine a tiny PS4 like console with nothing but super SD cards like this. They could probably get the size down to some of the "classic" mini consoles without optical or HDDs.
 
I thought SD cards wouldn't be great for sustained R/W no?
Still...I'm sure this is a good thing.
People adding a 256gb SD card to their phones for music or whatever...it takes fucking ages to get the shit onto the card in the first place.
 
How long before cameras and other such gear get support for this? This should have happened years ago. Now everyone will need to rebuy gear just to get speeds that should have been already available.
 
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