4K HDR Smartphones Driving Higher Memory, Storage ‘Requirements,’ Says Micron

The abundance of high-end smartphones shown at Mobile World Congress with larger 4K displays, multiple high-resolution cameras and 4K HDR video recording is driving “increased memory and storage requirements” in those devices, said Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on a Thursday earnings call. OEMs also are “building new artificial intelligence, augmented reality and lifelike virtual reality capabilities into high-end smartphones, including facial and voice recognition, real-time translation, fast image search and scene detection,” he said. To support these “data-intensive” capabilities, high-end smartphones are migrating towards 6 GB of low-power DRAM components in those devices, “a trend that bodes well for Micron given our leadership in LPDRAM power efficiency, which is essential for optimizing battery life,” he said. The average storage capacity of solid-state drives also is increasing “across all smartphone classes with new flagship models using 64 gigabytes of flash memory at a minimum,” he said. The growing adoption of AI “is not limited to mobile,” he said. At CES, “several companies showed AI smart cockpits in new automotive models,” he said. “These systems integrate the instrument dashboard, infotainment and telematic systems with a centralized compute and storage architecture to create a data center on wheels. Voice and gesture recognition, combined with driver alert monitoring capabilities, are making automobiles more intelligent and much more compute-intensive, requiring higher capacity and more powerful memory and storage solutions.”