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Huawei caught cheating performance test for new phones
- coderdude 8y agoMy screen jumped around so many fucking times when I open this link. Is the story "Pretty art screen startup Meural gets acquired by ugly wifi router company"? I can't tell anymore with these spammy fake fuckin news places TechCrunch is spam
- lysp 8y ago> 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. Source code for their AI engine: if (app == benchmark) { increasePerformance(); }
- vvanders 8y agoAs someone who spent a ton of time in the smartphone GPU/CPU space from '09-'13 we saw every single vendor do this. They'll happily ignore thermals, run custom shader microcode and any other tricks that'll boost their benchmark scores on common apps. We always kept a set of internal benchmarks that we didn't share with vendors and used that as a part of SoC evaluation. It had the benefit of not being gamed and also lined up with our normal workloads so we had a decent idea of where we expected the whole system to land.
- MBCook 8y agoDesktops have gone through it too: quack.exe and the HardOCP exposé. It’s been a long time since I thought of that.
- dmix 8y agoBackstory I found, I wasn't familiar with this story (2001). https://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_radeon_8500_drivers/ https://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_che... TLDR: ATI did the same thing with Quake 3 Arena which was commonly used as a benchmark game for testing new video cards of that era and which many game news sites were using.
- kllrnohj 8y agoThat's not an entirely accurate TLDR here as what ATI did back then is now considered standard practice for GPU drivers and is welcome. It is a bit different than the mobile space as GPU drivers are doing game-specific optimizations rather than benchmark-specific ones. The end user experience is a net win for the major titles, and as long as there's no visual cost it's considered fair game. It did go too far, even to the extreme of Nvidia hardcoding in their GPU driver the exact camera path that 3dmark took ( https://www.extremetech.com/computing/54154-driver-irregularities-may-inflate-nvidia-benchmarks https://www.extremetech.com/computing/54154-driver-irregular... ), which is more like what the mobile space is grappling with now. That was solved through a combination of scolding and by just changing the benchmarks to be what people actually do. You don't see 3dmark show up in GPU reviews much, you instead see performance results in a handful of major games. If mobile follows suit and shifts to doing things like benchmarking the average/90th/99th percentile of a game of Fortnite or something then these cheating practices become less feasible as a whole.
- MBCook 8y ago> what ATI did back then is now considered standard practice for GPU drivers and is welcome. Yep. That was the problem at he time. There were no shaders/etc so you’d just taking a demanding game and see how good it ran. No one optimized specific games in their drivers. So what ATI did made it appear the GPU was stronger on average that it was. If it was disclosed it would have been a feature and might have been welcomed. But it was secret. I remember seeing discussions about whether the kind of optimizations we see today are cheating. They sort of are. But why wouldn’t I want the faster frame rates? I forgot about the nVidia “micro optimization for a specific benchmark” one. No good excuse there because no one actually plays it.
- Jerry2 8y ago>we saw every single vendor do this Except Apple.
- vvanders 8y agoSo PowerVR is the only GPU design I don't have direct experience with in the mobile space, never worked with an SoC that fielded it. However given that Apple isn't the only one who licenses their designs I'd put a large sum of money on them doing the same thing.
- StudentStuff 8y agoApple plays this game, but in a different way. They know that apps like Geekbench test for only a short duration which won't necessarily hit their thermal throttling if the phone is cool enough. Detecting 100% load for a few dozen seconds and giving it full performance isn't hard, that is what Huawei and other vendors should have been doing. Issues like the Intel i9 performance going significantly downward with consistent usage are often missed by benchmarking apps: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/we-tested-throttling-on-the-macbook-pro-now-apple-says-it-has-a-firmware-fix/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/we-tested-throttling...
- jakevn 8y agoAre you implying that short burst performance is for gaming benchmarks?
- StudentStuff 8y agoNope, not implying that at all. For some games that may make sense, but I think that'd fall under the sustained heavy CPU/GPU usage category for most games. Same for compiling large apps, interactive HTML5 PWAs and such.
- dmoy 8y agoI am now very confused about which usage of the term "gaming" y'all are referring to.
- userbinator 8y agoWhat exactly does "adjust performance" even mean? If it's something like frequency throttling, there should be a user setting to force maximums, even at the expense of battery life, and likewise another option to force minimums.
- Shank 8y agoNo mobile device on the market runs at the same clock speed for any length of time. They’re always scaling down the clock speed for a variety of reasons (usually battery life and thermal management). If you ran at max speed all the time, you’d have trash battery life and probably cause overheating.
- vvanders 8y agoEach device has a pretty unique thermal profile(tablets dissipate heat better than small phones, more metal = better profile, etc) so these things tend to get tuned on a per-device basis. We had one device I was helping bring up where you could run the GPU full-tilt for ~60s. After that the device would reboot and fail to come up until it had cooled enough. Was a fun process characterizing that device and our workloads in 60s bursts. Couple weeks later they had it tuned in where you could run it 24/7 as the thermal limits kicked in pretty aggressively.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago> If it's something like frequency throttling, there should be a user setting to force maximums, even at the expense of battery life Battery life is not the only concern; a device that sits in your hand or your pocket needs to carefully manage heat.
- anyfoo 8y agoIf you enjoy a phone that runs hot, but only for a few minutes, depending on whether an empty battery or thermal protection kicks in first, sure. Power management and thermal budgets are a very real thing. The times where all device’s components would run at full speed are (thankfully) over for quite some time. 20 years ago PCs had multiple incredibly loud constantly running fans, that I think hardly anyone would put up with anymore (and would obviously not work for phones anyway). Today’s phones are extremely more powerful than those PCs in many ways, and yet consume a fraction of energy per time unit. Does not work without complex power management.
- remlov 8y agoReminds me of the time way back where Futuremark confirmed Nvidia was cheating on synthetic benchmarks by doing something similar except in reverse where they would degrade texture quality and use other tricks to artificially inflate scores in 3dmark. I'm certain ATI was caught doing so as well at some point.
- MBCook 8y agoYep. I believe ATI was the one where if you renamed quake.exe to quack.exe it suddenly performed significantly worse.
- bri3d 8y agoShader replacement and fingerprinting is par for the course in the GPU industry. The ethics are arguable when it comes to applications that aren't benchmarks - is it really wrong for the vendor to apply post-facto optimization to give end-users a better experience? Certainly, though, in the case of benchmarks it's a slimy practice.
- MBCook 8y agoIt is now, and because it improves things for gamers it’s hard to argue with. Quack.exe was for Quake 3, Before shaders even existed. At that time drivers didn’t have special paths for certain games, which is what made it a scandal. If ATI had said they were doing it, perhaps it would have been fine. But they hid it and looked like they were doing something underhanded (true or not).
- samsonradu 8y agoLooks a lot like the Volkswagen’s emission software /s
- komaromy 8y agoI don't see why an earnest benchmarking firm would let manufacturers know details like the name of the testing app.
- halflings 8y agoTransparency. Everybody can run the benchmark on their own device [1] and check the results, that way they can't deny the results saying that it's malicious, a conflict of interest or a configuration error. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark27 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glbenchmar...
- duxup 8y agoFans who is read about the benchmarks want to know.
- shard 8y agoHave you ever thought about what the business model is for benchmark companies? It probably won't come as a surprise to many of you, but there's a major conflict of interest when it comes to benchmark companies. They have "benchmark development programs" which companies pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to join, and in turn the member companies get early access to beta versions of the benchmarks, and get to propose optimizations to the benchmarks. Now the benchmark companies insist that they make impartial decisions when it comes to what to include or improve in the benchmarks, but you have to wonder just how much influence these member companies have over the benchmark companies, especially when it comes to new features that are in one but not all devices, or features that are not often used by developers but have different performance on different devices, what the decision process is to include tests for those features.
- wenbert 8y agoCan these be grounds for refund?
- craftyguy 8y agoClass action lawsuit, you get $10 off your next Huawei purchase.
- Joakal 8y agoIn Australia, can return for a full refund that it's not working as advertised.
- sjwright 8y agoOnly if the benchmark results were marketed by Huawei. Otherwise you would be limited to a claim under misleading or deceptive conduct which is still technically possible but you'd have bear the huge expense of taking them to court with the real possibility that you might lose and be bankrupted.
- EZ-E 8y agoI'm gonna get down voted but that's why I buy Apple phones. Comparing processors, ram, test scores means nothing compared to the actual experience
- coderdude 8y agoShut up. You get downvoted cuz ur bad. The hardware is good
- jackconnor 8y agoYea I kind of agree. I think most people, myself included, just don't really recognize minor performance differences, only relatively large ones. And I've always thought that these things improve so fast year-to-year, that it's kind of pointless to try and keep up. So, i shoot for a phone I like that performs pretty well, and just leave it at that (hello iPhone SE).
- ekianjo 8y agoApple does the same thing when they introduce new models. They pretend it runs x times faster than the previous flagship one. Same thing really.
- briandear 8y agoThey actually do run x times faster. They almost always have faster chips than the previous model. So they’ll pretty much always be faster. Who would release a slower phone as a new model? It doesn’t make any sense.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoMaybe if it tripled battery or something
- lostlogin 8y agoCan I have this please. It can be thicker and heavier if that helps.
- lamarpye 8y agoThis is a change from their normal business practices, usually they would steal performance results and publish them as their own.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chrisper 8y agoThat's a shame. I got a P20 Pro and I really like it (even the software). But I don't think I'll get another Huawei next time, because the company itself is really weird.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoUsing "weird" as a euphemism for unethical, or some other problem?
- chrisper 8y agoWeird as in they keep doing shady things even though they don't need the shady practices.
- axaxs 8y agoThis comes as no surprise. This is a company who has also been caught claiming their phone took a photo - but left in DSLR exif data, claiming a phone had UFS but shipped EMMC instead, boasting to work with dev community - only to lock them out months later, among other shady practices. They make nice phones at a good price, but is not a company to be trusted.
- sschueller 8y agoI am not surprised as others have been cought doing the same. Anyone remember the DSLR in the reflection in a Nokia ad that was supposedly shot a Nokia? Have you seen the rig Apple uses? doesn't look much like a phone anymore but technically is still an iPhone. Sadly the P20 pro has an incredible camera and would stand on its own without forgery. All I really care about is that they unlock their bootloader. The marketing crap is always half truths anyway. Retina, you mean 4k?
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago> Have you seen the rig Apple uses? I cant find this, do you have a link? I'm quite interested in what they do.
- techstrategist 8y agoApparently at least specialized lenses and stabilizers. https://petapixel.com/2017/06/30/truth-shot-iphone-style-ads/ https://petapixel.com/2017/06/30/truth-shot-iphone-style-ads...
- firefoxd 8y agoWell there is this: https://youtu.be/OkPter7MC1I https://youtu.be/OkPter7MC1I
- doe88 8y agoI don't doubt that is the kind of setup they use, but on this video I see a link to buy the lense advertised but it is not really implied that is what Apple used. Do we have a real knowledge of what hardware they really use for their materials? It would really be interesting to know at least for an information point of view.
- seattlebarley 8y agoThey're Chinese. Cheating and cheap fuckery should be automatically assumed.
- on_and_off 8y agoHuawei caught cheating at a meaningless 'test' nobody should care about. I spoke a fair bit about performances with a Googler in charger of it. Apparently he is appalled that OEMs have been optimizing their phones in order to score high on these benchmarks. They don't reflect real use at all and are not what should be optimized against. In the end, he documented the work he did on the various terminals he worked on so OEMs could do what they should have been doing for years..
- fapjacks 8y agoYeah, Huawei also sells shitty phones with locked bootloaders. Not interested in any case, cheating or no.
- chrisper 8y agoI disagree that they are shitty... hardware and software is great. Their ethical standards maybe not. Besides, if you want to install custom roms just get a phone that is supported officially (e.g. Pixel). I don't care about custom rom scene so it doesn't bother me that the bootlocker is locked. Though it was definitely a nice to have while it still existed.
- fapjacks 8y agoYou don't care about custom ROM scene, but by purchasing Huawei's products when you have plenty of other highly-competitive choices, you are supporting their ethical standards. And thus by proxy you are declaring your support for locked-down hardware and black-box software. As long as you are totally aware and recognize that you do not support the principles of free computing, and that you support companies asserting ownership rights over something after you have purchased it, then I have no problem with your reply. There is no hostile intent with this comment, but I do wonder if you understand what you are saying, when you say that you realize their ethical standards are not great, but you continue to buy their products because it currently does not affect you, despite having plenty of excellent alternatives in this market. Incidentally, I think you have a cool username.
- foobaw 8y agoI used to work at an OEM that did this. When the VW Emissions Scandal was publicized, we removed almost every piece of code that did things like these from all our phones. Not sure if it was ever reverted eventually but performance test might not matter to HN users but it is something that typical consumers do look at when making purchasing decisions, based on our research.
- maxerickson 8y agoYour second paragraph is completely ethically bankrupt. That a lie increases sales is at the top of the list of bad reasons to lie to customers (and they are all bad reasons).
- orf 8y ago> That a lie increases sales is at the top of the list of bad reasons to lie to customers I think that in the society we've built it's actually one of the best reasons to lie to customers. Advertising is pretty much built on that.
- maxerickson 8y agoReplying to that piece of text out of context is really boring.
- orf 8y agoI'm not sure how it's out of context, your entire comment was "lying to customers to increase sales is bad!".
- foobaw 8y agoI agree that it was unethical - practices like these are one of the major reasons I left. It's nearly impossible to be "ethical" in large OEM companies because of the extreme competition and complexity of the organization. Most of these large OEMs are so political that even the smallest changes would require way too much effort.
- ezoe 8y agoIt reminds me of the old GPU vendors when we were still using AGP bus(or pre-AGP era I forgot). Good evil days.
- taneq 8y agoAre those days gone? Benchmark-specific hacks in graphics drivers, I mean, not AGP. :P Also all the outrage when people discovered that a Radeon 9600 was just a Radeon 9800 running in crippled mode, and that you could bridge the tracks and re-enable it in 9800 mode. (Or something similar, anyway, that was a long time ago... :P )
- cehrlich 8y agoIt was the 9500 that could be modded into a 9700. Early versions could be softmodded, this was disabled in later revisions which could only be modded by soldering the additional rendering pipes back on. No idea why I remember this useless piece of information. Also on a completely different note, the 9700 Pro which was the flagship card of that generation, cost about $300. Times have changed.
- Geforce8472 8y ago$399 was the price on launch in 2002, which is around $550 adjusted for inflation, current flagship consumer GPU from Radeon is the Vega 64 priced at $599 RRP. Times haven't changed as much as you might think
- opencl 8y agoAMD's flagship is the $700 Vega 64 LC. NVIDIA's flagship 1080 Ti is $700 and their soon-to-launch 2080 Ti is $1000 or $1200 for the Founders Edition.
- taneq 8y agoThanks! I wasn't in the market for one at the time (I don't think I had a job yet) but remember the furore. The idea that someone would sell hardware that deliberately performed below its potential was shocking to a lot of people. I guess it still is now, for instance the Tesla "60kWh" cars which actually had 70kWh packs and had extra range enabled with an OTA update ahead of a hurricane.
- yason 8y agoThis is just what is expected: the vendors do this because they need to shine in these meaningless benchmarks because that's merely the name of the game. The tech magazines are in between: they publish results in reviews and phone comparisons but it seems that not many people really buy phones based on benchmark scores. They might give some overall idea of whether the phone is middle-end or high-end, but differences within one category tend to be small enough to not matter for the general buyer. To fix this, there should be different runs for these benchmarks. A max-clocks run with the phone set in an actively cooled cabin to see what the hardware can theoretically do at its very best, and another run in non-actively cooled room temperature with the test running for about an hour to rule out any benefits from temporary boosts or ignoring thermal limits to get an idea of continuously supported performance. Even those results wouldn't really tell much to the end-user. I always suggest my friends and relatives to buy a phone with excessively large memory and storage space because lack of memory and storage really is what turns phones slow after a few rounds of application and system updates. The performance edge on mobile is thinning out pretty much what happened with PCs. Ditto for memory and storage. Early on, vendors competed on who has the highest MHz cpus but somewhere between 1-2GHz the performance got high enough in nearly any case. 95% of people could buy about just any PC or laptop and it would be "fast enough". There's gigabytes of memory in even the sloppiest laptop these days, and enough SSD to make things fly. The same will happen with phones which makes it impossible to buy a phone that is too slow. At that point components with lower performance and less capacity will become more expensive due to the lack of volumes, that no vendor will bother any longer.
- Kenji 8y agohard-code peaks in performance specifically for the benchmark app Everyone does that. Are you really surprised? This has been a thing for many years.
- k_sze 8y agoHow ironic that Huawei uses the word "Honor" in some of its models.
- baybal2 8y agoWell, they sure missed the dis* prefix
- dspillett 8y ago> we have decided to delist the affected models and remove them from our performance rankings I would be inclined to be more aggressive than that. Leave them listed, but add support in the site or other publication system to display "deliberately broke the rules of the test" as a negative, perhaps displaying in a negative looking colour and in any graphs show as a if they scored, say, 20% worse then the worst other score. If presenting some arithmetically derived overall rating of benchmarks and other properties, balloon this further. Then if the rest of the phone is demonstrably brilliant they still have a hope of not looking terrible, but the cheating hurts the result otherwise. Unfortunately in these litigious times such an inclination would probably cause me some financial trouble, so it is probably for the best that I don't run a device comparison site! This may be why simply delisting was the chosen way of handling the situation here.
- da_murvel 8y agoIf something is cheap in terms of the price you pay for it, you're going to pay by something else. Be it poor quality components, information collection or unethical manufacturing processes. Yes, of course I am generalizing. There are good cheap(er) products and bad expensive ones.
- Bayart 8y agoAFAIK Chinese companies make money (in China) with the software they ship on their phones, and the associated Internet services. They all have a slew of what we'd call bloatware, but apparently Chinese people expect it and enjoy it for it being "free stuff". I don't really know what's their roadmap for Western markets considering nobody wants to let off their Google world. Even though the cynics among us will placate it as the Party bankrolling it for spying.
- Proven 8y agoBut it's cheap
- jaclaz 8y ago>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. If I may, also the fact that benchmarks are normally/usually "recognizable" through some "label" doesn't seem "smart" to me.
- thisisit 8y agoMy first reaction was reaction isn't this a dupe. But then the earlier one was about Huwaei's camera cheat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17805027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17805027