Smartphone maker Xiaomi may have just been caught doing what Apple and other large tech firms have been accused of doing in the past. According to an Anandtech review of the Xiaomi Mi 11T Pro, the company may be artificially throttling performance on the device in lieu of avoiding excessive heat generation. The Anandtech reviewer found that the company would let the processor perform at full speeds with anonymous applications, but would throttle the processor’s power when they were spoofed as known applications. It’s similar to issues other smartphone makers, including Apple and Samsung, have been accused of in the past and is usually written off by companies as safety features of sorts.
The Anandtech tests showed that at full capacity, the Mi 11T Pro performs at full speed and sends out warnings for overheating when required when it is used with regular applications. The reviewer spoofed apps to make the phone think it’s running Genshin impact, a popular game, and the device did not give out the same warnings that it did earlier because it started throttling the processor when it recognized the game. Here’s an excerpt from Anandtech’s review:
“In the Genshin spoofed test, the device has drastically lower thermal behaviour, and throttles at lot quicker to lower performance states. He phone was generally only 39°C warm which was very good.
On the Snapdragon 11T Pro, there’s quite the shocking revelation; the phone is outright capping peak performance, gutting it to otherwise the sustained performance levels of the anonymous version (before the overheating warning).
Thermals of the phone here are excellent at only around 37°C peak skin temperatures. Generally, the prolonged gaming performance here isn’t changed as the both end up at the same level.
The problem with this “optimisation” is of course that it’s completely misleading the benchmarks. If real games are actually severely limited in GPU frequency and performance, then this should also be represented in benchmarks for transparency.”
Forced power dropping on devices is not particularly a new thing. The tests suggest that Xiaomi is able to recognise how much heat known apps will generate and as a result it will throttle the performance to avoid overheating, something the company could easily say is an effort at preserving the phone’s overall life.
“I’m very exhausted by these opaque mechanisms, because most other reviewers will likely not catch them, which is likely Xiaomi’s goal. It’s a crap industry behaviour that needs to be abolished,” the Anandtech reviewer wrote.
