OnePlus has confirmed its OnePlus 9 Pro and OnePlus 9 throttle performance when running popular apps.
AnandTech was the first to notice something wasn’t quite right with the latest OnePlus 9 phones. When benchmarking the phones with the Chrome web browser, writer Andrei Frumusanu noticed the phone was not utilizing the high-performance Cortex-X1 cores when running Chrome, instead running it on the slower Cortex-A78 cores. In most cases, the phone wasn’t even running the Cortex-A78 at their full 2.41GHz, throttling them at 2GHz instead. Frumusanu found the OnePlus 9 throttled some of the most popular apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and more.
GeekBench, maker of the popular benchmarking software, followed up AnandTech’s investigation with one of their own, confirming the findings. As a result, GeekBench delisted the phone from their Android Benchmark charts.
After XDA Developers picked up the story, OnePlus reached out to them and offered a statement confirming the phones are, indeed, throttling.
Our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products, based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback. Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro in March, some users told us about some areas where we could improve the devices’ battery life and heat management. As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimize the devices’ performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the app’s processor requirements with the most appropriate power. This has helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption. While this may impact the devices’ performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus as always is to do what we can to improve the performance of the device for our users.
This is incredibly disappointing for OnePlus users. The phones’ Snapdragon 888 is an incredibly capable processor, but OnePlus owners will not get to experience its speed, instead being crippled by the device’s throttling.