The OnePlus 9 Pro throttling explanation takes a hit at the Snapdragon 888

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OnePlus has again plunged into the center of controversy in the past few days after something that would have passed under the radar of most people. Very few owners of the new OnePlus 9 Pro have complained about the phone’s performance, at least until some have decided to compare it with its peers. OnePlus’s revelation and admission that it was actually throttling some apps for battery life and thermal management reasons has become almost akin to the benchmarking scam it was accused of a few years ago. The company has now presented a more official and detailed defense of that practice which makes a somewhat ironic point about the smartphone market’s obsession with specs and figures.

To be clear, most OnePlus 9 Pro owners probably haven’t even noticed the slowdown in performance on some popular apps. Resource-intensive games and apps still use the Snapdragon 888’s powerful 3 GHz Cortex X1 core, so that’s not exactly an issue. Some users report some latency in scrolling web pages, for example, but it’s not consistent across the board and for all users.

OnePlus’ latest claim, however, causes some deep thought and headaches. In a nutshell, it practically says that the performance of the SoCs, the Snapdragon 888 in this context, is “often excessive” in certain scenarios. These scenarios, it turns out, include the most popular things people do on their phones, like surfing the web or using social media apps.

The company says that opening apps or playing games causes the Snapdragon 888 to go full throttle, but then OnePlus throttles performance for less critical actions. However, isn’t that how these processors already or should work, with the more powerful cores only starting when needed while delegating other tasks to the more energy-efficient cores? In other words, OnePlus is implementing optimizations that should already be there at the silicon level. If it isn’t, then it is approaching the problem at the wrong level of abstraction.

Measuring CPU performance and efficiency isn’t a trivial matter, which makes benchmarking an imprecise science. There is also the question of whether it is more efficient to quickly complete a CPU task using high-powered cores in very short bursts or to use lower cores that take longer to complete the same task. OnePlus seems to have set its feet on the latter, but, even in this case, its solution leaves some problems unsolved.

It also says it just wants to match each app with the most appropriate performance it needs. But who is in a position to judge which performance is appropriate for the app? Is it the developer who built the app with a certain performance threshold in mind? Is the user expecting an app to perform at its best without going overboard? Or is it the vendor, in this case OnePlus, whose name and reputation are at stake when apps go astray?

OnePlus says it has shifted its focus away from simply delivering absolute performance, a somewhat subtle way of saying it doesn’t want to play that CPU numbers game anymore. Its own marketing, however, seems to disprove this position, calling attention to the Snapdragon 888’s performance. If that chipset was too much for most of the things people do on their phones with most of the popular apps on Google Play. Store, why did he choose to use the processor anyway when he could have opted for something that might even make the OnePlus 9 Pro more affordable? Maybe he knows he won’t be fine with anything other than the Snapdragon 888, even if he didn’t want to use all of its power most of the time.

OnePlus, unfortunately, is walking a tightrope that it could have avoided had it been more direct with what it was doing behind the scenes. For better or worse, this scrutiny it is receiving could also lead to a deeper scrutiny of other phone makers who may actually be doing the same thing. It’s a slippery slope when these OEMs decide which performance is appropriate and which not, especially when they believe they can get away with it without having to tell anyone.

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