UPDATE: After the below episode, some of the most important Huawei handsets have been delisted from the following benchmarking platforms: UL Benchmarks, Futuremark and 3DMark. Until now, devices removed are Huawei P20 Pro, Nova 3, and Honor Play.

It is an INCREDIBLY big deal that @HuaweiMobile has had some of its devices delisted from a respected and trusted benchmark group like UL/Futuremark with 3DMark. The P20 Pro, Nova 3, and Honor Play results are removed.

— Ryan Shrout (@ryanshrout) September 6, 2018

You should never completely trust benchmarks. Never. We are not telling this to you because benchmarking platforms are not reliable, and neither because benchmarks are not the only factor to consider in order to evaluate the performance of a smartphone. You should not trust benchmarks because faking them has become a common practice, especially among Chinese smartphones manufacturers. Or at least this is what the president of Huawei’s software division, Mr. Wang Chenglu thinks. Yes, after the accusations on OnePlus and Meizu last year, even Huawei and Honor phones have been caught cheating on benchmarks to achieve higher results.

The sad discovery has been made by the guys from Anandtech, who have detected weird results on benchmarks after testing Huawei and Honor flagships, so they decided to dig deeper. An initial test has highlighted that Huawei P20 and P20 Pro obtained an inferior score on graphics benchmarks compared with the predecessor Huawei Mate 10, even though they had the same SoC (the octa-core Kirin 970) and the GPU with the same frequency. After another test, they have noticed a similar result with the new Honor Play. In a few words, these flagships are able to detect when the user is running a benchmark app and they increase their performance temporarily to obtain higher scores.

The Chinese company also used to highlight these scores to promote the devices. Anandtech revealed that the handsets are able to achieve up to 50% better results on benchmarks thanks to the trick. But while the smartphone cheats, it heats much more and energy consumption gets way higher. Chenglu has implicitly admitted the guilt at IFA 2018 and promised more transparency in the future. According to him and as we said above, faking benchmarks has become a common practice in China (he also mentioned a known Chinese manufacturer faking benchmarks) and Huawei had to adapt.

(source)

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ZOPO had announced the Speed 8 flagship back at MWC 2016 in Barcelona, Spain. However, we still haven’t got a good hands-on with the device, mainly because the phone is still in the pre-sale period. Earlier reports had revealed that the Helio X20 inside the ZOPO Speed 8 only managed to get around 85,000 on the AnTuTu benchmarking app. But that was mainly because the device was not fully optimized.

Now, ZOPO has just revealed to us the first official benchmark scores of the Helio X20 inside the ZOPO Speed 8 and the score is much better than before. According to the recent test, the phone managed to score 91,464 on AnTuTu which is pretty good. The company says that the increase in scores was due to the final optimizations being made to the device.

While this might not be the best score by an SoC in the market right now, it’s still pretty good for a mid-range flagship. Performance was never going to be the highlight of the Helio X20 deca-core chip, instead, the power efficiency brought by the use of tri-cluster design was always going to be the focus. We still haven’t seen the phone in action to see whether the battery life is significantly good, but we sure hope that the new chip contributes to a more than average life.

Of course, AnTuTu isn’t the best nor the only benchmark in the market. So, we will have to see the phone’s performance on Geekbench and GFXBench to judge its overall performance. And then, there’s the real life performance, of how the hardware works with software. So, there’s still a lot of tests to be done before we can comment on the performance of the Speed 8.

Since it has been a few months since the phone’s release, let recap the specs. The ZOPO Speed 8 comes with Helio X20 with 4GB RAM, 5.5-inch 1080p display, 32GB ROM, fingerprint sensor, NFC, 3600mAh battery, dual SIM, USB Type-C, 21MP Sony IMX230 rear sensor with dual LED flash, 8MP front-facing shooter, 4G LTE support, and Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS.

The phone is already up for pre-order via various retailers for $279.

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Meizu just announced the Pro 6 smartphone and the overall package is pretty impressive. The phone starts at less than $400 and comes with the upgraded Helio X25 chip along with 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and a lot of high-end features. Since the phone is now official, we can get some real benchmark results of the device. Thanks to Chinese media, we have the Pro 6 AnTuTu and Geekbench results with Helio X25 inside and the results are more or less similar to what we had seen previously.

So, in the official Pro 6 conference, Meizu had said that the phone manages to score around 101,757 points on AnTuTu. Well, from past experience we know that real life results come out a bit less than the official figure, and the same thing has happened here. The Helio X25 inside the Pro 6 has managed to score 96,169 in the recent AnTuTu test, a good 5500 points below the official figure. But that seems to be acceptable, because under perfect conditions the Pro 6 should be able to break the 100K mark.

This also shows that the Helio X25 is slightly better on AnTuTu as compared to Kirin 950, which manages to score around 93,000 (max). Also, in the Geekbench test as well, Helio X25 outdoes the Kirin 950 inside the Mate 8 with a score of over 1900 on average in the single-core test and 6300 (avg) in the multi-core test. On the other hand, Kirin 950 scores around 1700 and 6200 in the two respective tests.

To be fair, Huawei Kirin 955 would be a better competitor to the Helio X25. Initial benchmark tests have shown AnTuTu results to be around 96-98K, which is at par with Helio x25’s results. However, benchmarks are not always a good indicator of the real life performance of the chip, and hence, just because one chip gets 2K more than the other in a benchmark test, it doesn’t really make it a better performer.

We will have to see the actual performance of the chip in real life usage and how well it is optimized with the software to see which phone offers a better user experience.

(Source)

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