Comment by simoncion

> You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it.

What I've observed is

* when Steam downloads are in progress, between four and nine logical CPUs worth of processing power on my 32-way Threadripper are being used and zero logical CPUs are running at 100%

* when EGS downloads are in progress, exactly one logical CPU on that Threadripper is pegged at 100%

It's true that you can do gigabit downloads without having a multithreaded downloader. [0] But it seems to be true that the two biggest PC-game-store clients absolutely cannot... for whatever reason. Given the prevalence of gaming machines that have CPUs with four or more logical CPUs, I expect it's not really worth the effort to make whatever Steam is doing single-threaded, or whatever single-threaded thing EGS is doing fast enough to saturate a 1gbit+ download.

[0] One widely-deployed example would be SSH/SCP.