Samsung is one of the leading providers of flash memory chips, and there’s a good chance your devices have Samsung NAND chips inside offering anywhere from 8GB to 64GB of storage. Just recently Samsung started mass producing 128GB chips too, using its 20nm manufacturing process.

While 20nm chips may be the standard today, Samsung is already thinking ahead and has announced production of 10nm chips is now underway. 10nm 64GB eMMC (embedded multimedia card) Pro Class 2000 chips will make their way into smartphones and tablets, but a new JEDEC interface standard needs to be approved first.

The 10nm chips are 20% smaller and offer a 30% performance gain over existing parts. To put that in context, existing eMMC typically has random read and write speeds of 1,500 and 3,500 IOPS respectively. Samsung’s new memory achieves 2,000 IOPS write speeds and 5,000 IOPS read speeds. Similarly, overall bandwidth has been improved significantly from 140MB/s to 260MB/s for reads. Writes remain the same speed at 50MB/s.

Gadget manufacturers will be happy to have faster memory available to use, but even happier with the space saving they offer. The new chips measure 11.5 x 13mm compared to today’s 12 x 16mm parts. And in a device like a smartphone, every millimeter counts.

Samsung doesn’t expect to get a new interface standard agreed until next year, meaning we probably wont see 10nm memory used in smartphones and tablets until at least late 2013. Even so, with production already underway there’s not going to be any shortages if someone like Apple decides to use them in a new iPhone or iPad.