In a market as competitive as the smartphone scene, it is understandable that some companies would like to give their phones an extra kick to make them standout above the rest. Unfortunately, OnePlus and Meizu went about it the wrong way as the phones from both companies are caught cheating when they were being benchmarked by certain applications.
This deception was first found by the folks at XDA developers when they noticed the odd behaviour OnePlus 3T was showing when they were benchmarking the phone. According to them, the big CPU cores on the OnePlus 3T were designed to idle at 1.29GHz while the smaller cores idle on 0.98GHz despite the fact that there is no load on the processor. During regular use, both CPU cores would idle at 0.31GHz This means that the results for the OnePlus 3T would be artificially inflated once the benchmark is over.
Meizu does things a little differently compared to the OnePlus 3T. According to the report, Meizu’s Pro 6 Plus is designed in such a way that the big CPU cores on the phone would only activate when benchmarking begins. Under normal use, these cores would remain idle. In essence, Meizu has designed the phone to hide extra processing power until a benchmark is launched which would trigger the CPU cores to operate as per normal.
Ever since XDA developers went public with the cheats, OnePlus has since responded to the allegations. The company admitted that they’ve implemented certain mechanisms that would “trigger the processor to run more aggressively” and has promised that the mechanism will not be used for benchmark cheating in upcoming Oxygen OS builds for the OnePlus 3 and the OnePlus 3T. Meizu has yet to comment on the issue as of the time of writing.
The story about smartphones cheating during benchmarks doesn’t end here though. XDA developers have also mentioned that they’ve caught other smartphones cheating during benchmarking as well. While they’ve refused to explicitly mention the phones that were caught until they’ve confirmed that cheating is in fact occuring, XDA developers did reveal the names of manufacturers that were NOT caught cheating: HTC, Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor, Google, and Sony.
Source: XDA Developers, Android Authority
