Our hypothesis was that OnePlus was targeting these benchmarks by name, and was entering an alternate CPU scaling mode to pump up their benchmark scores. One of our main concerns was that OnePlus was possibly setting looser thermal restrictions in this mode in order avoid the problems they had with the OnePlus One, OnePlus X, and OnePlus 2, where the phones were handling the additional cores coming online for the multi-core section of Geekbench poorly, and occasionally throttling down substantially as a result.Īnalysis of the OnePlus 3T by GeekBench creator Primate Labs showed that the phone's software was actively looking for the benchmark apps Geekbench, AnTuTu, Androbench, Quadrant, Vellamo and GFXBench. Upon first seeing this we were worried that OnePlus’ CPU scaling was simply set a bit strangely, however upon further testing we came to the conclusion that OnePlus must be targeting specific applications. This is quite strange, as normally both sets of cores drop down to 0.31 GHz on the OnePlus 3T when there is no load. When entering certain benchmarking apps, the OnePlus 3T’s cores would stay above 0.98 GHz for the little cores and 1.29 GHz for the big cores, even when the CPU load dropped to 0%. XDA Developers explains what it found when investigating the app opening speed of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821: Around a year ago, there were also complaints from AMD that SYSmark benchmarks were biased in favor of Intel. If this story sounds familiar, you need to cast your mind back to 2013/14 when Samsung was among smartphone manufacturers thought to be interfering with benchmark results to make their devices seem better than they actually were.