Oppo Electronics, the Chinese major, has now caught cheating benchmarks on its latest smartphone Oppo F7. A new report coming from Vietnam stated that Oppo is apparently clocking the speed of eight cores to the maximum 2GHz, which further yields better benchmark results as compared to the competition. For the unaware, the MediaTek Helio P60 SoC comes with similar hardware as the Snapdragon 660 SoC and Snapdragon 636 SoC, and the only Helio P60 SoC device available in the market is the Oppo F7. In every benchmark test on the web, the Helio P60 chipset achieved better scores in not equal scores than the Snapdragon 660 SoC or Snapdragon 636 SoC devices with aplomb. And the reason behind this is Oppo cheating the benchmark apps by increasing the clock speed of all cores to the maximum level.
To recall, the MediaTek Helio P60 SoC was unveiled at the MWC 2018 event in February. The chipset is manufactured on 12nm TSMC FinFET process. The CPU of the P60 includes four ARM Cortex A53 cores and four ARM Cortex A73 cores, all clocked at 2GHz. The chipset works in tandem with Mali-G72 MP3 GPU with a maximum clock speed of 800MHz.
A Vietnam tech publication, Genk.vn ran the popular benchmark tests on the Oppo F7 and the Snapdragon 660-powered Xiaomi Mi 6X. But the real question which arose was how the Oppo F7 is getting higher scores when compared to other devices? To verify that, they developed a 'Hello World' application with the application package name as 'com.AnTuTu.ABenchMark.' They ran the sample application without a single line of code and surprised to see all the eight cores pushed to the maximum of 2GHz, which confirmed that Oppo is cheating the benchmark tests.
The same case might be applicable to other benchmark applications as well. The Oppo F7 managed to beat the competition in benchmark services such as AnTuTu, Geekbench 4 multi-core and PCMark Work 2.0. The results are super evident in the Geekbench 4 multi-core test as the Oppo F7 fetched a multi-core score of 5848 and the Mi 6X with Snapdragon 660 SoC achieved 4960 score, while the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro with Snapdragon 636 SoC came out with 4925 multi-core score.
Once the benchmark applications are opened in the Oppo F7, the CPU speed will be pushed to 2GHz, which is the highest clock speed of the MediaTek Helio P60 SoC. That said, once the user exits the benchmark app, the clock speed comes down to 793MHz. So this is the reason behind the insane benchmark scores achieved by the Oppo F7 across the globe.
The MediaTek Helio P60 SoC is possibly the best MediaTek chipset ever, and for the first time, several Indian media and international media reported that the Helio P60 actually converted its benchmark performance into real life.
Benchmark manipulation isn't a new one in the industry, and several smartphone brands did it deliberately in the past. Just last year, Oppo's child company OnePlus was caught cheating benchmarks on the OnePlus 5T, and the company openly admitted that. Samsung even did that in the past, but the real question is what's the reason behind Oppo cheating benchmarks with the Oppo F7, considering the chipset is powerful enough to compete with the competition.
The Vietnam-based blog received an official statement from Oppo which illustrated how the 12nm SoC process technology was driven by NeuroPilot AI. This technology comes coupled with APUs which are essentially AI Processing Units that allow the chipset to deliver exceptional performance and thus it is able to compete with processors like the Snapdragon 626 of the Snapdragon 450 SoC.
