Oppo F7 Said to Be Manipulating Benchmark Scores, Oppo Responds

Oppo F7, the company's latest smartphone, was launched in India late last month. Following the market trend, this is the Chinese phone maker's first handset to sport a notch on its display. As is known widely, the octa-core MediaTek Helio P60 is the SoC that powers the Oppo F7. In a recent set of developments, the smartphone has allegedly been found to be boosting performance during AnTuTu benchmark. In the manipulated test results, the phone reportedly shows better performance compared to contemporaries such as the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro and Mi 6X.

As per a report by Vietnamese blog Genk, the Oppo F7 "forces" all eight cores to boost up to 2GHz during benchmark tests. In their testing process, it was found that the Oppo F7 scored exceptionally well on CPU tests including AnTuTu, Geekbench 4, and PCMark Work 2.0. Comparatively, the Xiaomi Mi 6X - with Snapdragon 660 - and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro - with the Snapdragon 636 - scored less despite having similarly powered SoCs, if not better, the report claims.

To catch Oppo's deliberate boosting attempt, the reviewers at Genk created a blank application with the package name - "com.AnTuTu.ABenchmark" disguising it as the real deal. Testing the fake AnTuTu package on Oppo F7 revealed that the phone was indeed boosting performance to 2GHz without the application having a single line of code in it. The report states this indicates it is highly probable that Oppo has deliberately intervened in the process.

Oppo in a statement to the Vietnam-based blog said that the reason behind this boost is the use of AI (artificial intelligence) and its new 12nm SoC process technology. Specifically, the phone is claimed to sport NeuroPilot AI technology that, along with two APUs (AI Processing Units), performs at peak performance and competes with the likes of the Snapdragon 626 or the Snapdragon 450 SoC.

This is not an isolated incident. Previously, much like Oppo, another BBK-owned phone maker OnePlus has also been caught manipulating benchmarks to show inflated results with the OnePlus 5 last year.

Do Oppo F7 and Vivo V9 show what to expect from OnePlus 6? We discussed that on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.