Determined to put AI everywhereSamsung has just unveiled new Micro SD cards which, according to the company, could facilitate the deployment of this technology.
What if the most important innovation of recent months owed its success to one of the most common accessories of recent years? In a press release published on February 28, 2024, Samsung announced a new collection of Micro SD cards that will soon arrive on the market. And as artificial intelligence is in fashion, the manufacturer has obviously made this point a selling point for its memory cards.
A big leap in performance
Samsung’s brand new 256 GB Micro SD card is one of the first (in the field of consumer computing) to adopt the latest “SD Express” standard which allows theoretical sequential read speeds of 800 Mb to be achieved. /s. “Despite their tiny size, these memory cards offer performance and capacity comparable to SSDs, allowing them to take advantage of modern applications and be ready for the future to come», Explains Hangu Sohn, head of the storage branch at Samsung.
If comparing Micro SD cards to the performance of SSDs is somewhat misleading, since the most recent disks generously exceed 800 Mb/s, it is still a big step forward in the world of Micro SD cards which tend to oscillate between 100 and 250 Mb/s depending on the model. A performance gain which allows Samsung to assert that these cards represent “effective solutions to meet the growing demands of mobile computing and embedded AI“.
A marketing pirouette?
According to the manufacturer, the reading speed and the space available on the cards make it possible to consider the use of local AI models rather than relying on the cloud. This forgets that AI also requires gargantuan computing power that many modern phones do not quite possess. There are many examples of AI used locally for text or image recognition, but the most advanced uses of artificial intelligence still require high-powered graphics cards which are currently only found in OpenAI servers, Google and Microsoft.
If the arrival of even faster storage modules is rather a good thing (provided that consumer devices are compatible with the standard), the argument for the democratization of AI with the help of a Micro SD card holds up more of a marketing pirouette than anything else at the moment. The 256 GB Express SD card should arrive “later in the year» while a 1 TB model (but using the UHS-1 standard) is intended for “lthird quarter 2024“.
Source : Samsung
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