Huawei justifies pumping benchmark scores, and you won't believe the reason (UPDATED)

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Huawei and Honor admit cheating on benchmark scores, but cite a good reason for the swindle
UPDATE: Huawei sent us its own take on the matter, which we are providing in full below, saying that the Performance Mode that gets triggered by benchmark apps would be made available to its phone users to turn on if a situation demands it:



"Everybody is doing it, so why can't we?" Besides the first studio album of The Cranberries, this was Huawei's justification when they were shown to swindle popular benchmark apps. 

It's not the first time a manufacturer is found to ditch their power draw/performance barriers and turn off thermal throttling for the processor when their phones recognize the likes of Geekbench, AnTuTu, or other benchies being run. Here's how Honor does it in GFXBench with its new Play gaming phone that we reviewed last week, according to AnandTech:

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As you can see, all thermal runaway precautions are taken off when the phone detects the benchmark software being run, while when that variable is switched on, the score is much lower, and the power consumption of the chipset, too.


Pressed for an answer, Dr. Wang Chenglu, Huawei's President of Software, noted that synthetic benchmarks are increasingly drifting away from being representative of real-world usage, yet they are widely used from reviewers and the general public to gauge a handset's performance. This Catch 22 has forced Honor to play the same game with its Play phone as most major Chinese manufacturers, the vast majority of which pump up the benchmark scores in a similar manner.

AnTuTuHigher is better
Honor Play204779
Honor 10196732
OnePlus 6260353.5
Razer Phone178121
JetStreamHigher is better
Honor Play56.253
Honor 1045.875
OnePlus 688.123
Razer Phone60.199
GFXBench Car Chase on-screenHigher is better
Honor Play22
Honor 1020
OnePlus 630
Razer Phone15
GFXBench Manhattan 3.1 on-screenHigher is better
Honor Play38
Honor 1034
OnePlus 650
Razer Phone22
Geekbench 4 single-coreHigher is better
Honor Play1897
Honor 101897
OnePlus 62413.66
Razer Phone1923
Geekbench 4 multi-coreHigher is better
Honor Play6618
Honor 106515
OnePlus 68929
Razer Phone6721

Long story short, while there are users that judge a phone's daily performance by its synthetic benchmark numbers, there will be cheating involved, and companies seem pretty unapologetic about it.

source: AnandTech

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