Chinese smartphone maker OPPO has been caught influencing benchmark results on its latest mid-range Android smartphone OPPO F7. The phone was introduced in March sporting an octa-core MediaTek Helio P60 chipset, which has since been found to be outperforming smartphones with comparative specifications on popular benchmarking tools including AnTuTu, Geekbench 4, and PCMark Work 2.0. A Vietnamese blog Genk ran a few tests to conclude that OPPO was indeed pushing the processor to its limit while running benchmarks to further up the numbers. The publication compared the OPPO F7 to the Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus with Snapdragon 625, Redmi 5 Pro with Snapdragon 636, and the Mi 6X with Snapdragon 660 on all the aforementioned tools with OPPO’s offering outperforming each of its opponents by a significant margin.
On a deeper analysis, it was found that the device’s software regularly monitors the processes running and will make the processor to work at full capacity with all its cores clocking 2GHz each time a benchmarking app is opened. When those apps are closed, the clock speed would gradually lower to 793Mhz. This was reported to happen just by opening the said apps and not running the benchmark tests. To confirm this theory, the publication went on to create a light application with a package name same as that of the official AnTuTu app for Android. Upon running that app, the OPPO F7 was again found to fire up all the eight cores of its Helio P60 processor to run at 2GHz. On the contrary, the Mi 6X had its processor run between 0.8 and 1.6GHz clock speed for the most part during the test.
The Chinese company later came out with a clarification that OPPO F7’s NeuroPilot AI technology and the two AI Processing Units (APUs) with their algorithms are causing these constantly high clock speeds to provide an 80-percent improvement in performance. The company markets its F series devices in some Asian markets as a ‘Selfie Expert’ and the 2018 iteration under the lineup claims to leverage AI to provide a better experience not only while taking pictures but also in bettering the overall performance. It debuted in India sporting a notched display in a 19:9 aspect ratio at a price of Rs. 21,990 ($340).