Xiaomi appears to be throttling performance on their phones

Not long after Samsung’s throttling debacle, Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi appears to have been caught doing exactly the same thing. 

As noted by Geekbench co-founder Jon Poole, Xiaomi appears to have been caught red-handed throttling, at least, their Mi 11 smartphone when the device is not running a dedicated benchmarking tool, such as Geekbench. 

In their testing, which Poole recounts on Twitter, Poole states that when a Xiaomi Mi 11 was running a version of Geekbench that had been disguised as the game Fortnite, the phone performed dramatically worse in testing, receiving scores that were 30% lower for single-core performance, and 15% lower for multi-core performance. 

As we noted when Samsung was caught throttling their Galaxy S22 devices through their Game Optimizing Service, this practice is often done by manufacturers to extend the life of the device throughout general use, while still providing blistering scores in dedicated benchmarking tests.

While extending the battery life of a phone is not always a bad thing, smartphone manufacturers, such as Samsung and now Xiaomi, have, for some reason, decided to hide what they’re doing, rather than offering the feature as an optional toggle to users that they could use at their own discretion, 

Here are results from a Xiaomi Mi 11 running Geekbench and Geekbench disguised as Fortnite. Single-core scores are 30% lower, and multi-core scores are 15% lower, in the Fortnite build. https://t.co/wGAnSi73gR

— John Poole (@jfpoole) March 27, 2022

At the time of writing Xiaomi has yet to issue a statement commenting on these throttling allegations, so we will have to wait and see how they will resolve this matter if they mention it at all.