OnePlus defends its application limitation on the 9 Pro, Snapdragon 888 “exaggerated in certain scenarios”



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Following the announcement that OnePlus was limiting the performance of the 9-series phones, the company presented its forum with a more detailed response, explaining in more detail the logic of its actions. In short, OnePlus claims that modern chipsets are “overkill” and that you don’t have to run at full power for simple tasks like scrolling on a web page or on social media. Thus, the company limits performance to improve power consumption and heat dissipation under the pretext that it is thoroughly testing these changes for negative effects.

In case you weren’t familiar with the origin story, OnePlus was caught strangling a software-defined app roster to varying degrees – in some cases, like Chrome, quite heavily. The timeline of the behavior is unclear, with some indications that it may have been present to some degree since launch, while others claim it is a more recent development intended to combat, less in part, against previous overheating problems. Whatever the cause, Geekbench considers the treatment of benchmarking apps to be different from other apps as a form of benchmarking manipulation and has removed the 9-series devices.

OnePlus’ new explanation verifies the existence of a software-defined list of popular apps it regulates (likely the “300” its original statement referred to), and based on the various metrics unearthed by Anandtech and from the company’s own declarations, this limitation varies. OnePlus claims that its “test team is making sure that the actual user experience is not negatively affected” with these performance tweaks, and that the Snapdragon 888 is essentially too fast for most of the actions it needs to do. – the processor just doesn’t need to be running at full speed all the time.

Sounds logical, right? If you have a small job, why waste a ton of “power” to do it? Well, there are different approaches, but as many custom kernel users will tell you (especially in the ICS / Jelly Bean era, when hardware really struggled to keep up with software), that idea isn’t still true. It’s technical, and there’s a lot more to it than my rough simplification, but sometimes the most effective thing for small burst loads is to hit maximum speed and finish them as quickly as possible, maximizing the time that the processor goes without any load to sleep.

I can’t tell you if OnePlus’ strategy is good or bad. The custom kernel developers I contacted didn’t respond, but at least one well-known developer thinks it’s a good idea and Qualcomm’s poor decisions to develop the Snapdragon 888 are to blame for it all. But even excluding the logic of running longer at a lower clock speed, there are two other sides to this argument.

On the one hand, there’s the fact that the problem slipped under most of our radars outside of a handful of landmarks until last week. This is Probably an indicator that OnePlus is basically right and that most people don’t notice the decrease in performance of some apps. However, even our review noted an inconsistent lag with things like the keyboard in some apps – behavior that we felt was new and we felt would be affected by throttling the app in the foreground when the keyboard was open. . Some may still argue that using a OnePlus phone feels ‘fast’, but even anecdotally within the confines of the AP, we’ve talked more than once about how the performance was different on the series. 9.

It might take a bit more tweaking from OnePlus, but I still can’t help but feel it’s not the right approach on a more fundamental level. After all, Samsung doesn’t need to resort to this kind of heavy app throttling behavior even with similar hardware, and yet the S21 Ultra still beats the OnePlus 9 Pro in terms of battery life a year. margin greater than the difference in capacity of 500 mAh would imply. – a metric that OnePlus claims to target.

Software is fast becoming OnePlus’ Achilles heel, between that throttle and the late, low-quality updates the company is providing to older devices. Merging the software with OPPO might help matters, but it could also make matters worse, and there are concerns that OxygenOS will end up being just a Realme UI-like skin for OPPO’s Color OS. In this time of transition, with all of these public concerns about the company’s future, the last thing OnePlus needed was another scandal to get more negative attention. And, worst of all, most of our readers either don’t care about this issue or would agree if it could be disabled, so take note of this potential fix, OnePlus.



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