Huawei admits cheating in benchmarks on recent smartphones

Website Anandtech has caught Huawei cheating in benchmarks. Several smartphones made the soc consume much more power and lifted the temperature limit when the software detected benchmarks.

Huawei says it was forced to cheat because several other Chinese manufacturers are also doing the same, writes Anandtech. In addition, the graphics performance of Kirin-socs has been criticized for years.

The software detects the standard releases of benchmarks, after which the performance is improved because the phone allows higher power consumption and higher temperature. Anandtech found this out because the site uses special editions of benchmarks that it gets from the developers of GFXBench and 3DMark, among others. The cheats make the phone perform between 10 and 90 percent better than it would under normal conditions. Huawei has promised that it will only show third-party verified benchmark results in future presentations. In addition, it tells The Register that users can access the cheat through a setting, which it euphemistically refers to as “performance mode.” In mode, however, the phone consumes almost 9W, values ​​that cannot be maintained for long on smartphones.

It is not the first time that Huawei has been caught cheating. For example, last year it supplied review copies of the P10 with ufs storage, but provided some consumers with the much slower emmc type. The manufacturer has also been turning down the brightness for several years now, a setting that cannot be turned off. Without intervention by testers, Huawei smartphones reach higher values ​​during battery tests on ‘fixed brightness’ than under normal circumstances.

Benchmark cheating has happened more often in the mobile market. OnePlus, Samsung and HTC, among others, have been guilty of this in the past. All the manufacturers caught have stopped cheating on benchmarks.