![]() While normally such optimizations have a small effect, in the case of the affected benchmarks the difference is noticeable and quite significant. Such behavior is visible in 3DMark as well, although it doesn't seem to happen in Basemark OS II or Basemark X 1.1. ![]() This sort of optimization seems to be exclusive to the HiSilicon devices. Strangely, this policy doesn't seem to be universal either as I haven't seen evidence of altered behavior in Huawei's Snapdragon devices. While I'm not surprised to see this kind of behavior when combined with altered frequency scaling, it's a bit disappointing. When running the same workload on the Play Store version of GFXBench, we see that four cores are plugged for almost the entirety of the test. Any noticeable deviation from this pattern would definitely be concerning. While this graph is somewhat boring, it's important as it shows that only three cores are plugged for the full duration of the test. The average frequency is around 1.7 GHz, which is significantly higher than what we see in the renamed version of the benchmark. There's far more time spent at 1.8 GHz, and the frequency profile is incredibly tight outside of the beginning and end. Here, we can see a significant difference in the CPU frequency curve. For the most part this only happens in short periods, and there is a great deal of variation in clock speeds, with an average of about 1.3 GHz throughout the test. At any rate, the behavior is noticeably quite reluctant when it comes to reaching 1.8 GHz. I haven't seen any differences in GPU behavior as the governor seems to stay clocked at an appropriate level regardless of the benchmark. To test for differences in governor behavior, we'll start by looking at how the P7 normally behaves when faced with a benchmark workload. As a flagship smartphone, it also has a five inch display with a 1080p resolution. As Huawei's flagship, it's equipped with a Kirin 910T SoC, which has four Cortex A9r4 CPUs running at a maximum of 1.8 GHz, and two gigabytes of RAM. For those that are unfamiliar with the Huawei Ascend P7, it's considered to be Huawei's flagship smartphone. While I've been working on reviewing the Ascend P7 and have found a lot to like, I am sure that the Ascend P7 alters CPU governor behavior in certain benchmarks. Unfortunately, I have to talk about a case where this isn't true. Even if an OEM hasn't stopped such behavior, there are options that make it possible to use the altered CPU/GPU governor in all applications. Now, most OEMs have either stopped this behavior. Previously, we saw changes such as an automatic 10% GPU overclock that was almost never achieved in normal applications, and behavior that would automatically plug in all cores and set the CPU frequency to maximum. While benchmark optimization has been a hot topic, recently it has faded into the background as the industry adjusted.
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