So according to an FCC filing the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro will support Wi-Fi 6E but not the newer Wi-Fi 7.
For a comparison, you can get a max speed of 9.6 Gb/s with Wi-Fi 6E, while Wi-Fi 7 can reach a speed of 46 Gb/s.
I’m just going to put this information here: the use case for 46Gb WiFi is going to be extremely niche. There is nearly no legitimate use case where you can achieve that speed on your phone.
The problem here is that:
- The majority of internet traffic is TCP
- TCP protocol processing is atomic (i.e. your speed is bottlenecked by a single CPU)
- The bottleneck is the receiver (i.e. downloader)
- TCP is too complex for efficient receiver-side hardware offloads (i.e. can’t workaround this issue by adding more special hardware)
What does this mean?
Your connection speed on a wifi 7 device WILL be bottlenecked by your single-core CPU speed, even if you are doing absolutely nothing except transmitting data. This assumes you are only using a TCP single connection (e.g. downloading a file from a website). But that’s the majority of use cases unless you are running a server (in this case on your phone).
I haven’t checked what CPU the Pixel 8 uses. But my Pixel 7 has a Cortex A-78. I also don’t have the raw data handy for the 3Ghz A-78, but I do have data from the 2Ghz A-53 connected to a 100Gbps Ethernet NIC which is around 8-9Gbps. The A78 generally outperforms the A53 by 1.5x (At least that’s the characteristics on the Nvidia Bluefield DPUs). So we can assume 12-14Gbps max for a single connection with Wifi 7 running on a state-of-the-art ARM CPU.
That is still nowhere near 46Gbps. It’s like mounting a Vulcan Minigun on a bicycle.
To use the full wifi bandwidth, you would need to have multiple connections running on different cores. That’s also not including the switches/servers connected to the wifi AP. Unless you are running a Redis server on your phone, I see no reason why Wifi 7 would be needed unless the remaining hardware is upgraded significantly.
There’s no way the in order A53 from 2012 gets even close to the performance of the OoO A78 from 2020.
Didn’t know one is in-order and the other is OoO. The A53 is still being used for new products by Nvidia in 2020 (Bluefield-2). So there must be some merit to it or Nvidia is cheaping out on stuff
The BlueField-3 uses the A78 and unfortunately I don’t have one to test. I’m basing everything I know based on conference talks. I do know apparently the A78 does not have working performance counters for perf which makes it a pain to debug.
That being said, a 2023 Mid-end Xeon gets you up to 60Gbps TCP single flow (100Gbps ConnectX-6 NIC) So maybe that’s a better comparison? Might need to account for all the other x86 optimizations
Also, I think the bottleneck for TCP processing is branching, not memory access. So I’m not sure if OoO execution would help much. Would the A78 have improved branch predictors?
A53 is used for low-power and low-cost applications… It’s a “good enough” CPU that has really good performance/area.
Perfect performance counters for OoO is really hard.
OoO also makes BP more useful. An OoO processor without BP isn’t very useful because there aren’t that many instructions between branches… So, generally, modern OoO processors dedicate far more resources to BP.
I mean, if speed is the only reason to upgrade what would be the point? A phone can never make use of 6E speeds it’s entirely pointless to have even faster.
Are there some other benefits it’s missing out on?
Honestly though by the time wifi 7 is out in the world enough to be utilised the majority of Pixel 8 phones will be on the scrapheap.
But I want the bigger number!!! (Pouts)
I guess it might matter to people who’d like to stream their games from their console to their phone using some remote play app.
But that would require 1. The console to support >10 Gbps transfers, 2. Your internet infrastructure to support >10 Gbps in every step of the chain, and 3. The streaming actually using >10 Gbps.
Either one of these conditions is very unlikely to be fulfilled, let alone all of them.
Seriously this. The next gen routers are pretty expensive.
I can see in the next 3-4 years where it’s more affordable. For most of the population, they absolutely not ready for this.
I mean 10gb/s is already like 20x more than you would need for that and probably more.
Having near 50gb/s is like, the bandwidth of an entire university campus going into your phone or something. Like just so overkill. You could stream 4K netflix over 3000 times over literally. Like, what could the use for that ever be? You couldn’t even write or store that much data on your phone lol.
It’s like saying you are disappointed because your new car is speed restricted to 50000 mph. Like…cool? It ain’t gonna reach that so we’re fine.
Which is why I asked if it had other benefits like better range or something, presumably that would be the benefit to be hyped over if any.
It’s overkill, but 50Gbps is not enough for a Public University these days. A single core switch in NYC can see an average of 2.6Tbps of traffic. You’ll probably need at least 200-400Gbps for an entire university.
But yeah, still overkill for a phone.
Name a console that has WiFi 7 compatibility. It’s none.
PS5 has WiFi 6, not even 6E. Xbox Series X has WiFi 5.
Both have only been around for 2 years and have another 5-6 left before a new gen is released.
The phone having WiFi 7 is irrelevant if nothing else you have has it.
Wi-Fi 4 (~150mbps max) would probably handle a 4K local stream over remote play just fine if all that mattered was bandwidth, I think…
Latency/ping is gonna be the real killer, right? Hopefully they’ve made some big improvements along with raw bandwidth
My home internet tops out well below 9.6 Gb/s. I’m Canadian, so it’s unlikely my ISP will provide that at a reasonable price. Hence, this is unlikely to affect my buying decision.
If it’s a flagship phone and the other flagships are shipping with the chipset that is wifi 7 then it’s a bad mark against Google.
However in real terms it’s unlikely to impact the majority of users. Considering there’s no routers with wifi 7 in existence and no Internet companies are capable of 46gbs.
Google should be future proofing devices. If they reduce price for an older modem then that would be beneficial. They won’t but it would be nice.
Yeah but is that future within the next 2-5 years?
My home internet is 25/5. I just upgraded the home network to Wi-Fi 6E, after years of Wi-Fi 4. While 7 would be nice to have for future consideration, it’s still too expensive for me to adopt it.
Meh
