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Card Performance

An SI Board Since February 2012

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Introduction Market Data Compact

Slow smartphone? It's not the network, it's NAND flash
Phase change memory could be key to better smartphone performance, researchers say
By Lucas Mearian
February 17, 2012 10:15 AM ET
6 Comments

Computerworld - SAN JOSE -- NAND flash memory in smartphones can significantly blunt the performance of web browsing, email loading, games and even social network sites Facebook and Google+, researchers say.

While users and experts typically point to processor chips and wireless network connectivity as the culprit of poor smartphone performance, storage is more of an issue, according to researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and NEC Corp.

The researchers tested top selling 16GB embedded flash memory cards in several Android smartphones and found performance over WiFi varied between 100% to 300% across applications.

In one flash memory test, performance dropped more than 20X.

"A good chunk of time for users is spent waiting for websites to load ... [and for] applications to load," said Hyojun Kim, a Ph.D. student in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.

And, while waiting for apps to load is annoying, a more nefarious impact of poor flash performance is that it depletes a smartphone's battery.

Kim, lead author of the report, Revisiting Storage for Smartphones, discussed the research at the Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies here this week.

Kim said wireless network performance has kept pace with most of today's mobile applications, as have the single and dual core CPUs being used in today's sophisticated smartphones. What hasn't kept pace is the bandwidth of NAND flash, he said.

"Why would anyone want to see a 20-second wait time on their phone, particularly if the network is not the problem," he said.

The research identified the problem with poor flash device performance to be rooted in random I/O from application databases such as heavy random writes.

In flash memory, random write performance is orders of magnitude worse than sequential writes, Kim said.

The smartphone tests involved the use of applications such as WebBench Browser, Facebook, Android Email. Google Maps, App Install, Pulse News Reader, and RLBench SQLite. The flash cards came from Transcend, RiData, SanDisk, Kingston, Wintec, A-Data, Patriot Memory and PNY.

Flash benchmarks
Benchmark testing of smartphone flash memory showed performance varied widely among vendor's products depending on whether I/O was random or sequential

"Apart from the benefits of selecting a good flash card, there are some fundamental ways we're using storage in a bad way," he said, referring to the way many applications are created to write data randomly, which causes flash performance to fall of a cliff.

The researcher's initial efforts focused on developing a set of pilot solutions that can improve the performance of a smartphone's storage subsystem and consequently mobile applications.

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