OnePlus was supposed to be the torchbearer that could have finally beaten the big wig smartphone companies like Apple and Samsung. With their cheaper flagship killers that cost way less than premium phones whilst having the same performance overall. However, since their glory days, they have kept bumping up their prices with every release. The phones are still pretty good but the price keeps creeping closer to that flagship range.
Now it seems that there are doing some wizardry with the benchmarks on their new phone the OnePlus 9 Pro. The phone packs a Snapdragon 888 chip and is really fast but not as fast as what the numbers will lead you to believe. According to the folks over at Anandtech and their investigation. It has been revealed the OnePlus 9 isn’t using all its power to its fullest. The phone is aggressively throttling performance for many apps while going full ham when it comes to benchmark apps.
This basically means that the number you see on apps like Geekbench isn’t what you’re actually getting because OnePlus is throttling performance. The Snapdragon 888 is the most powerful mobile chip right now. With an eight-core CPU and one of the cores running at almost 3GHz, the performance is pretty great for such a small device that it’s packed it. The 3 GHz core is a Cortex X1 design called the prime core.
The investigation revealed that OnePlus seemingly had a blacklist that contained names of applications for which the CPU would throttle. Of course benchmarking apps weren’t on this list. This explained why the phone was uneven in how it was performing in daily usage. Most OEMs usually boost the clock rates for benchmark apps but it seems that OnePlus, one-upped everyone by doing the exact opposite. You can take a look at a performance graph from Anandtech.
You can clearly see that the performance varies depending on what type of app is running. It seems that the phone delegates the task to slower cores and the fast 3GHz core is left unused. Geekbench has now removed the OnePlus 9 Pro from its popular benchmark charts. It remains to be seen if this is actually intentional or is a random bug that not even OnePlus knows about.
I bet they did it to conserve battery life and thought no one would find out. It’s hilarious how developers think they can get away with stuff but the internet always finds the way. Like how miners removed the hash rate limit from the RTX 3060.
The investigation team is now looking to see if other OnePlus 9 Pro devices are also doing the same thing or not because if they are, OnePlus is going to be canceled.
