Seoul, April 19, 2026, 02:42 KST
Samsung Electronics’ next Galaxy S flagship may get a much faster storage system, but the upgrade is being tipped for only part of the Galaxy S27 lineup, a split that could leave lower-priced models behind. SamMobile, citing Naver user yeux1122, said UFS 5.0 chips may be used in some Galaxy S27 models, with the Galaxy S27 Pro and S27 Ultra seen as possible recipients while cheaper versions could stay on older storage.
The timing matters because UFS 5.0 is moving from standard to supplier samples. Kioxia said in February it had started shipping evaluation samples of UFS 5.0 embedded flash memory, including 512GB and 1TB versions, and said two lanes can reach about 10.8 GB/s effective read/write performance.
UFS, or Universal Flash Storage, is the phone’s internal flash memory. JEDEC Chairman Mian Quddus called UFS 5.0 a “foundational technology for next-generation devices,” while Jay Hyun, vice president of Samsung’s NAND Planning and Strategy Group, said edge-device AI has made storage performance and efficiency “increasingly important” and UFS 5.0 offers “up to two times the performance of UFS 4.1.” Business Wire
In plain terms, faster storage helps a phone move big files, games, camera data and on-device AI models with less delay. On-device AI means software tasks handled on the handset itself, rather than sent to a cloud server.
Cost is the catch. Gadgets360, also citing the Naver post, reported Samsung reconsidered broader adoption because of rising costs and production challenges, and said the Galaxy S27 and S27+ could retain UFS 4.0 while the Ultra gets UFS 5.0.
That split would fit with a premium-heavy S27 roadmap already being reported. The Verge, citing ETNews, said this month that Samsung may add a Galaxy S27 Pro between Plus and Ultra, without S Pen support but with Privacy Display technology, a lineup that would more closely mirror Apple’s multi-tier iPhone strategy.
The storage report landed as early data on Samsung’s Exynos 2700 continued to circulate. Sportskeeda said a Geekbench 6 run for a chip identified as s5e9975 scored 2,603 in single-core and 10,350 in multi-core, close to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s multi-core score of 10,732 but behind its 3,607 single-core result.
Gadgets360 separately reported that the unannounced chip listed a 10-core architecture and an Xclipse 970 GPU, ran Android 17 with roughly 12GB of RAM, and could power Samsung’s 2027 flagship lineup if the listing reflects real hardware.
The Exynos angle matters because Samsung still leans on Qualcomm at the top end in many markets. Moon Sung-hoon, vice president of hardware for Samsung’s mobile business, said the company hopes to put Exynos chips “into all our lineups in the future,” but also called mobile-chip development “difficult” work that takes “several years.” Android Central
None of this is a confirmed Galaxy S27 spec sheet. Benchmark listings can change before retail silicon, and the storage leak points as much to pricing pressure as performance: faster memory may become one more way Samsung separates standard Galaxy buyers from Pro and Ultra buyers.
