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%. 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. 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. 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.
We reached out to the team at Primate Labs (the creators of Geekbench), who were instrumental in exposing the first wave of benchmark cheating, and partnered with them for further testing. We brought a OnePlus 3T to Primate Labs’ office in Toronto for some initial analysis. The initial testing included a ROM dump which found that the OnePlus 3T was directly looking for quite a few apps by name. Most notably, the OnePlus 3T was looking for Geekbench, AnTuTu, Androbench, Quadrant, Vellamo, and GFXBench.
As by this point we had fairly clear evidence that OnePlus was engaging in benchmark cheating, Primate Labs built a “Bob’s Mini Golf Putt” version of Geekbench 4 for us. Thanks to the substantial changes between Geekbench 3 and 4, the “Mini Golf” version had to be rebuilt from the ground up specifically for this testing. This version of Geekbench 4 is designed to avoid any benchmark detection, in order to allow Geekbench to run as a normal application on phones that are cheating (going beyond the package renaming that fools most attempts at benchmark cheating).
Immediately upon opening the app, the difference was clear. The OnePlus 3T was idling at 0.31 GHz, the way it does in most apps, rather than at 1.29 GHz for the big cores and 0.98 GHz for the little cores like it does in the regular Geekbench app.
