Huawei Caught Cheating Performance Test For New Phones

An anonymous reader writes: UL, the company behind the tablet and phone performance benchmark app 3DMark, has delisted new Huawei phones from its “Best Smartphone” leaderboard after AnandTech discovered the phone maker was boosting its performance to ace the app’s test. The phones delisted were the P20, P20 Pro, Nova 3 and the Honor Play. “After testing the devices in our own lab and confirming that they breach our rules, we have decided to delist the affected models and remove them from our performance rankings,” the company said in a statement.

For the Huawei case, the rules are actually a little fuzzy. Phones are permitted to adjust performance based on workload, which results in peaks or dips in performance for different apps, but they are not permitted to hard-code peaks in performance specifically for the benchmark app. Huawei reportedly claimed that the peak in performance seen during the run of the benchmark app was an intuitive jump determined by AI; however, when an unlabeled version of the benchmark test was run, the phones were unable to recognize it and, as a result, displayed lower performances. In other words, the phones aren’t so smart after all.