Qualcomm today boasted about data from Ookla – the maker of the very popular Speedtest.net website and application – showing that Android devices using the Snapdragon 845 have much faster Internet speeds than non-Android smartphones that aren’t using Snapdragon chipsets, mainly those with the Intel XMM 7480 and 7360 modems. Qualcomm is effectively saying the modem inside the Snapdragon 845 – the Snapdragon X20 LTE – is faster than what is used in iPhones, seeing as Apple is the only mobile device maker leveraging Intel’s mobile networking solutions.
The results were collected from Ookla, using its Speedtest app that is available on both iOS and Android. These results were from around one million tests and included devices that were connected to either AT&T or T-Mobile’s network. On T-Mobile, there were around 480,000 tests complete, with around 570,000 on AT&T’s network. Compared to non-Android smartphones running on the Intel XMM 7480, the Snapdragon 845-based smartphones were about 53-percent faster in typical download speeds and had 32-percent lower typical latency. The results are even larger when comparing to the Intel XMM 7360 modem, where typical download speeds were 68-percent faster, typical upload speeds were 23-percent faster and typical latency was around 35-percent faster. On AT&T the results were fairly similar. With the Intel XMM7480 modem, typical download speeds were about 40-percent faster, typical download speeds were around 20-percent faster and latency was about 20-percent lower. Results for the Intel XMM 7360 were a bit larger, with the typical download speeds being about 64-percent faster, typical upload speeds around 41-percent faster and typical latency about 27-percent lower.
The Intel XMM 7360 is a slightly older modem that is actually used in the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, while the Intel XMM 7480 is used in the new round of iPhones (iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X). While it’s interesting to see how these results faired for both Intel and Qualcomm, it’s important to note that this data was crowdsourced from tests running between April and June of 2018. And while yes Ookla is comparing devices running on the same network, it’s not being compared side-by-side on the same network location at the same time. Ookla and Qualcomm also didn’t mention how the devices were split. If there were more Snapdragon 845-based smartphones that were tested, or more Intel-based smartphones tested. So it’s important to take this with a grain of salt, but it does show that the Snapdragon X20 LTE modem is superior to what Intel offers right now.