RealMe GT Banned From Antutu, But What Does That Mean For Buyers

The RealMe GT has been caught cheating on its Antutu benchmarking application and the implications of that are huge. Specifically the because before the RealMe GT was announced RealMe published their Antutu Results prior to launching the device. Lets examine why the RealMe GT cheating scandal is such a big deal, how Antutu discovered the RealMe GT was actually cheating, and finally what this means for consumers.

Before we can dive into this subject thought, lets discuss what is Antutu and why the RealMe GT cheating is such a big deal. Antutu is a popular benchmarking platform used to test the computational performance of a device. Antutu test several different components and several different processes that most mobile phones have to do. Antutu will test the multi-threaded performance for applications that have to do a lot of little tasks. An example of this could be autocorrect on a notes or messaging application. When composing a message the software is constantly checking the text that has been inputted for spelling errors grammatical mistakes or other such things. On the other hand single core performance is meant for one task that takes a lot of computational power. an example of this could be rendering a video out of your favorite gallery application or in a mobile application such as Adobe Premiere Rush. In this instance our single core needs to ramp up to the highest frequency possible to complete one complicated set of tasks. This is obviously an oversimplification and applies specifically to the RealMe GT cheating in Antutu benchmarks.

The RealMe GT is currently the cheapest phone with the Snapdragon 888 CPU offered by RealMe. This means that the real me GT is aimed squarely at people trying to get the most computational horsepower for the cheapest price. A phone like this would probably be popular with mobile gamers or people that don't care about what a device is actually like to use and people who focus specifically on benchmarks as a measuring tool for which device to buy. This means for many people the Antutu score of the RealMe GT versus the price of the device is a huge deciding factor. RealMe cheating this benchmark could be the deciding factor between buying, and not buying a device.

Next, let's discuss how Antutu discovered that the RealMe GT was actually cheating. This information comes directly from Antutu's Weibo post that had declared the RealMe GT was actually cheating. Antutu discovered that during the multicore benchmark the system was intercepting threads meant for the lower powered cores and scheduling them for the higher power high performance cores. It's unlikely that this is some type of high performance mode or mix up on the RealMe GT for a few reasons. First is that if the RealMe GT had this hidden high performance mode that was regularly being activated than gaming and even high stress tasks would destroy battery life. Second, although sending the multi threaded workload to the most powerful core would increase performance it undermines the entire point of having these multicore CPUs. This gives us a good indication that RealMe specifically found a way to inflate it's Antutu benchmark scores prior to launch.

Finally what does Antutu's banning of the RealMe GT mean for consumers. Well very little frankly. The RealMe GT was a device made for keyboard warriors and gamers looking for the highest score. This Antutu score has very little impact on what these devices are actually like to use on a daily basis and serve more as a bragging rights for their perspective buyers. The RealMe GT being banned from Antutu simply goes to show that hile companies like apple use their conflated numbers to sell devices its not apple alone.