How Much Time Will Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-Powered Phones Take To Download 4K Movies?

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 comes with the Snapdragon X65 5G modem, which is theoretically capable of offering up to 10Gbps download speeds on a 5G network. With this speed, it takes less than 20 seconds to download a two-hour-long 4K movie, which will be around 14GB in size.

Similarly, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 also comes with Wi-Fi 6E support, where it offers a peak download speed of 3.6Gbps. This means, with a gigabit-class broadband connection, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-powered smartphone can download a two-hour-long 4K movie in less than a minute.

These Are Theoretical Speeds

The aforementioned numbers are based on the official specs sheet shared by the company. However, in the real world, there will be a lot of additional parameters that impact the wireless download speeds. First, the server that houses those 4K movies should also have a lot of bandwidth to give us these downloading speeds.

Another bottleneck that might limit users from achieving these download speeds is the disk read/write speed. Even though the device might be able to download content at 10Gbps or 3.6Gbps, a device should be able to write that content onto the flash storage as the cache memory can only store a limited amount of data.

Complete Bandwidth Should Be Allocated To A Single Task

Another parameter that makes it impossible to achieve this speed in the real world is the fact that all the data bandwidth might not be allocated to the downloading task unless there is an option to prioritize that specific task.

Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 System allows the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to achieve a peak download speed of 3.6Gbps over the WiFi 6E network. As of now, only select routers support WiFi 6E technology, and only a limited number of broadband providers offer download speeds of over 1Gbps over WiFi.

The same also applied to the 5G network, where, the network provider should offer 10Gbps download bandwidth to download a 4K movie within 10 seconds on a smartphone in the real world.