yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jimbodan:
Thanks for the insight. That's kind of disappointing. I was under the impression that because of the better GPU in the 810 that it was better than the 808 even when the 810 was throttling when it comes to gaming. I've been avoiding anything with an 808 due to the lackluster GPU but if it's going to actually be better for gaming then the 810 I might have to reconsider. I wish I was in a better position to just wait until next year for a Nexus with an 820 chip. I doubt we'll see many decent tests since most people either do them in the most unscientific ways possible or only care about how hot the phone gets and not the throttling. I wonder if there will be some way to change at what temperature and how much the chip throttles?
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] M@rs:
i think with a custom kernel, uv and 2 cores disabled it should be better than a 808 because it's like an 808 with slightly higher clock and better gpu.

But only time will tell for sure.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
This is probably about the closest comparison we have ATM to know how it should behave. https://www.androidpit.com/snapdragon-810-vs-808-is-8-cores-really-better-than-6 my guess is that even with the throttling the gpu performance will be better. I've noticed before on devices such as s6 that while playing a game and monitoring usage in real time. My cpus may be at like 300mhz, but the game is running great, meaning its mostly gpu constrained. However this can vary from game to game obviously. I'd still go with 810 over 808 anyday. You can always turn two cores off worst case, you can't ever add two cores and a better gpu.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] emiwonder:
Guys, try to open cpu - z and u will be shocked. All 8 cores are awake, they are all working even if you do not touch display. When u start swiping, first 4 cores jumo up to 1,3 while other 4 sits on their minium freq. That is weird imo, why would phone need 8 cores to hold nothing on a background?
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
That's not surprising. That's also how the s6 which uses linaros version of hmp operates as well. No hotplugging except when the screen is off. You have to remember that even though all 8 cores are always on it doesn't actually mean they are "on". There's various states of sleep that a core can enter and these drastically reduce power usage. So even though those big cores are online all the time, if they aren't processing anything they are basically sleeping and using very little power. The benefit of this is so that when tasks need to be migrated between the big and little clusters there isn't the added latency and cost of hotplugging a core first. This is similar to the reason the nexus 6 got rid of hotplugging as well, just on a bigger scale.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] emiwonder:
okay, so there is everything okay with that? does it use more battery comparing to only 2-4 cores being online?
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
Yes it's totally fine :). It really depends on your usage, but for the majority of people battery and performance will likely be better by just leaving all 8 cores running rather than attempting to run a complicated hotplugging algorithm that is constantly turning cores on and off, and migrating processes from one core to another as they turn on and off. That's because when one core gets hotplugged, all the work has to be quickly offloaded onto another core that is on. Then when that core gets hotplugged back on, a bunch of work from other cores has to migrate over to that core. The process of migrating those processes from one core to another is expensive in terms of performance and battery, so when its happening quite often it can actually decrease battery life rather than improve it. Obviously, by having 8 cores always on and ready to go, rather than having 2 cores on with 6 ready to hotplug in, the performance is also better. Hope that helps explain it a bit :)
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] emiwonder:
okay thank you so much, that helped alot!
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
Happy to help :) the nexus 6 used to hotplug cores but after an update Google made it just run all 4 all the time with no hotplugging. They must have done some testing I guess.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] emiwonder:
So hotplugging basically depends on kernel, right?
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
Yes hotplugging is kernel based. Although mpdecision is a userspace binary if I remember correctly and that's what Qualcomm uses for hotplugging.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cb474:
Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know if this applies, but it was long ago discovered on computers that battery saving CPU governors actually used more energy than on demand governors. Ramping up a CPU part way, to use less battery, made a process take longer and actually used more battery, than just letting a process ramp the CPU all the way up to 100%, get it done quickly, and then ramping it back down quickly. So I can imagine that it might actually be more energy efficient in many cases to have all the CPU capacity available in a instant, than to require a bunch of extra steps to get it going (which themselves use energy). Of course, the proof is in the pudding and without a specific test of the exact question, who knows, but this fits with what Xileforce is saying. Efficiency is a complicated thing.

I would tend to give the chipset manufacturers and the handset manufacturers the benefit of the doubt. I think most consumers care much more about battery life (and are more likely to notice battery life differences in day to day use) than they care about small differences in CPU performance. So I think things are probably being optimized for battery life first.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] farble1670:
i have a Nexus 6 with the 805, and i definitely have heat throttling issues. 60fps for the first 5m, then 25fps and burning fingers. i've even had it shutdown from overheating (seemed like it failed to throttle as i was getting continuous 60fps at the time).
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] kozad:
Qualcomm has said that only 2.1 has been used in any device - so if that's true, the 2.0 chip never made it out into the wild. The LG G Flex 2 used 2.1 for example, and it was one of the first phone to rock an 810.

That said, some OEMs have used heatsinks on the chip to cope with the heat, like OnePlus, while Microsoft went even further and resorted to using heatpipes on the 810 AND the 808 on the Lumia 950/950 XL.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
6p thermal throttling test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj7qtJZBIGU
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cb474:
Thanks for the link. It's interesting to see how easy it is to get the 6P (and OnePlus 2) to throttle in very short period of time and demonstrate the effects of the throttling on performance of the phones with the 810. Whereas the Note 5, with a different chipset, hardly throttles at all. It would have been interesting to see what happned if he kept running the test even more than the three consecutive times in the video.

It does also show that the 6P stays in a reasonable temperature range, not getting any hotter than the Note 5 (but of course the 6P has to sacrifice a lot of performance to accomplish that).
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
Yea, the big question is how it affects real life usage. I've been talking to some people who have the 6p and they swear up and down that they haven't noticed any lag from throttling even during extended use and gaming but, as everyone's use cases are so different, its hard to say whether or not it will affect you or not.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cb474:
Yeah, it's hard to say. I can't imagine it makes much difference for basic use of the phone, interacting with the GUI, web surfiing, etc., since the CPU will only ramp up for a second and then down again, to do different tastsk, so probably never getting to the point where it throttles.

For gaming, etc., I take people's subjective observations with a pretty big grain of salt. Afterall, even throttled the 810 is a very powerful CPU. It's just not an improvement over the 808, 805, 801. But those are powerful CPUs also. So people just may be more happy with yesterday's best level of CPU performance than they realize, even though they like the idea that they have the latest and greatest. Also, games, I assume, are designed to respond differently to different levels of CPU performance, drop frame rates or whatever is necessary to keep working. After all, they have to work on a lot of different phones. So I don't know that a lag is what people would see.

Someone earlier in this thread, I think, suggested that it may be more of an issue with future games. The 810 is intrinsically less future proof, since it does not improve on last year's CPU performance. I guess we'll see. I'm basically happy it doesn't get unduely hot. I'd rather have a little extra throttling, than a phone that's hot to hold.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
I got my 6p today. Here is how I went about stress testing my phone:

The phone was sitting on the desk collecting notifications etc. for most of the day. I had roughly 50 battery left.

I gave the phone to my son and asked him to watch BBC Earth on Play Movies for approx. 15 minutes. Then I left Play Movies (did not close out) and opened Play Store and downloaded AnTuTu.

Then I ran the benchmark 8 times in a row. Here are the numbers:

run1: 47514

run2: 44964

run3: 43398

run4: 47111

At this point I started downloading Asphalt8. Letting it download in the background, I went back to running the benchmarks.

run5: 46799

run6: 45974

run7: 40633

Asphalt8 finished downloading.

run8: 37971

Here I figured throttling started to kick in. I left AnTuTu app (did not close out) and switched to Play Store and clicked on Open Asphalt. Went through setup, demo etc. and played one race. There were *lots* of dropped frames. The race was not unplayable but it was certainly not smooth either.

Then I switched back to AnTuTu and run another test. At the end of this test, AnTuTu got stuck at a black screen instead of giving me a score. So I closed all apps and re opened AnTuTu. AnTuTu showed the last test as 43000-something (this was run9 that got stuck). Then I re-ran it.

run10: 45120

Up until this point the phone only got slightly warm.

Then I took some pictures and recorded 6 4k video clips (each averaging 5 minutes). Now the phone started getting hot-ish. So at this point I re-ran AnTuTu.

run11: 29523

Now my battery is at 15 percent. Once it charges back up, I'm planning to do a continuous 4k recording to see how long it can go.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
Thanks for sharing your experience with details! If I had to guess it was already throttling during your first antutu test because you should be closer to 60k, like 57ish. Likely it just started throttling even more severely later on.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
Okay, so there is a hidden limit of 8:00 minutes for 4k recording for Nexus 6p. The camera stops recording at 8:00 minutes.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
Interesting. Out of curiosity if you immediately try to record more 4k immediately after it stops you will it work? If so that means its not a heat related limit at least.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
Yes, I can record immediately, but after a couple of 5 minute clips, the phone starts to get quite warm. In my initial test at the end of approximately 6 4k clips (each averaging 5 minutes), the phone was feeling very warm towards the top half. The gap between recording each of these clips was less than 1 minute. So after approximately 30 minutes of 4k recording, the UI became quite choppy. Multi-tasking carousel was quite choppy. Immediately running AnTuTu revealed a score of 29523. So at least some of the choppiness was coming from the throttled state as evidenced by a very low score.

Update: most of the choppiness seems to be coming from all the apps being unloaded from memory.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
I was actually able to fool the camera app to continue past the 8:00 minutes limit by touching the screen multiple times to refocus when approaching the 8:00 mark. The couple of times I tried this, it did continue recording past 8 minutes but both times the camera app crashed around 11-12 minutes into the recording taking the whole clip with it. I lost both 12-ish minute clips. Not good.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
That's odd. I wonder why the limit is in place then. One would initially think heat issues, but if you can record again right after that doesn't seem to be the case. Only other thing I can think of is storage space but I'm not sure why Google would care in that regard.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
I don't know for sure, but my guess would be it has something to do with writing to storage. Anandtech did a detailed analysis on the NAND performance of iphone 6s, and I'd guess one of the reasons the iphones are good at 4k recording is their NAND performance, specifically sequential write performance. It will be interesting to see where the 6p stands in comparison.

The fact that recording 4k completely unloads _all_ running apps from memory tells me the 8 minute limit has something to do with storage rather than capture. I think this is also the reason why, if the app crashes, the video is just completely lost, no parts are recoverable.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
More testing.

I'm unable to get any decent length of 4k video on this phone without dropped frames. If I'm not able to get this to work, this phone is going back. This kind of footage is unusable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmWGsI45b5s

I can't imagine what can be causing this.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
Wow that's lame. I wonder if it's due to throttlig the SOC and thats causing issues encoding the data fast enough.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Batfink33:
I got that effect recording 4k on the Note 4 when I used a powersaving govenor on a custom kernel. It's as if the CPU can't handle it. Perhaps the 810 Is throttling so much?
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
I'm getting a replacement. I really hope I got a defective unit. I love this phone and don't want to send it back, but 4k is a deal breaker for me.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] anglerstock:
Seems more like camera stabilization issues due to lack of OIS..
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] drawde40599:
My 4K videos come out Beautiful , nothing like yours .

I'd share but there family videos , I'll see if I can take a random one here

---------- Post added at 04:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:27 PM ----------

The phone throttling isn't noticed in real life use , unless you have something heavy going on in background and forground .

Example: downloading a large file , listening to YouTube and web surfing .

It's going to take a few Kernel tweaks to get it right but its not nearly as exaggerated as the internet says .
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] chris719:
You are partially correct I'm guessing. The Nexus 6P can't write to flash fast enough for direct-to-flash 4k so it probably records to a RAM buffer which is why it unloads all apps and you get nothing until it finishes and it commits that to flash. The 6P uses software encryption accelerated by specific CPU instructions, it is not a full HW implementation without a performance penalty unfortunately.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
That is encouraging. If you decide to post a test video could you please make one with lots of left-right panning. I notice more frame dropping when panning horizontally.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cb474:
Thanks for all the testing on the phone. It's a nice demonstration of what the limits are and what it takes for the throttling to kick in on the 6P. I suppose it's not surprising that 4K video recording would be the ultimate limit. Processing video is about the most CPU intensive thing you can do (other than very complex mathematical calculations).

*

NAND peroformance is often overlooked in phones, since in most day to day uses it doesn't make a noticeable difference. But it does seem like an area in which just about all phone manufacturers cheap out, except Apple.

*

I'm not sure if I think the frame dropping is due to the lack of OIS, as noted in another post. But in that shot you're panning very fast. It seems like that's a mode of shooting that makes many a video recording device drop frames. (And I'm not really sure why anyone would normally want to pan that fast.)
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
I was panning fast so that I can get more dropped frames to demonstrate the problem. Even when panning slowly, I get dropped frames just not as many. In any case, I think the camera ought to handle fast panning as well.

Having said that, I really do think I have a defective unit. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I'll update when I have the replacement unit and have had a chance to play with it.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cb474:
I see. It will be interesting to see how the new phone does when you get it.

After thinking about this more, I do wonder if the dropped frames are indirectly a result of the lack of OIS, as anglerstock suggests. Or more specifically, caused by the digital image stablization, which is trying to compensate for the motion. Is it dropping frame or skipping forward in space as a result of wanky image stablization? In other words, could it be a stutter, rather than dropped frames? Obviously digital image stablization adds to the processing load, which may just be too much ontop of 4K video.

Do you get dropped frames even when the phone is still, in 4K mode? That might help differentiate between CPU/RAM issues, versus weird effects from the image stablization.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
Thanks for the ideas.

I don't think stabilization works in 4k mode on the Nexus 6p. When I first got the phone, I noticed lots of jello effect when recording in 1080p with stabilization on. This never happened in 4k. At any rate I turned off "Video Stabilization" in the Camera app settings, so whatever is causing the dropped frames is not coming from electronic stabilization.

I do see some dropped frames when shooting without any movement, but they are few and far between and hard to spot. But if you look carefully, you will see them. I think its ok for home videos but the footage can't be used anywhere else.

The problem becomes quite apparent the moment you start moving the camera.

Again, I have seen really nice 4k footage from 6p on youtube with lot of panning and no dropped frames. So I'm still holding out hope. Should know for sure in a few days time!
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jonny_mako:
For those who are interested, I got the replacement phone and it suffers the same problem. After much testing, my conclusion is that this is indeed a problem of stabilization. To be more precise, the lack of stabilization somehow messes up sampling when the camera is moved. My most convincing test so far is that if I vertically stabilize the camera, no matter the speed of the pan, there are no dropped frames.

I tested a whole bunch of camera apps too and all of them drop frames. My guess is the sensor api probably assumes/requires stabilization and there is no stabilization for 4k. So I don't think this is something that can be fixed easily unless digital stabilization is enabled in 4k mode. And I don't know if that is even possible given 4k uses the whole sensor.

So, for me it is virtually impossible to get usable 4k footage (without dropped frames) other than by holding the camera steady. Its a bummer but after much consideration I've decided to keep the phone, primarily because of the camera sensor. In my view no sensor on a phone today beats it. Its a shame there is no 4k stabilization and the 1080p stabilization is quite poor (jello).
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] AJZ12:
I've noticed that my 6P will start running slow and if I open CPU-Z, it shows a different revision of the SoC. When it starts running smooth again, CPU-Z corrects the SoC revision number. Anyone have any ideas why? Is this a software or hardware problem?

When it's running slow

Normal speeds
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] SlimSnoopOS:
The CPU is throttling itself which occurs on the Snapdragon 810. The different CPU listed is just the slower CPU cluster carrying the load. It has been discussed to death over the last year in Android blogs but the basic gist is that the big cluster will shutdown at a certain point of sustained load which causes a dip in performance. Qualcomm has forced the BIG.little in their Snapdragon 808 (inside the Nexus 5X) and 810 (Nexus 6P) to throttle down cuz they overheat.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] AJZ12:
I know all of that. I should have been more clear. My 6P does this when it's not overheating. My phone can come out of doze after sitting there for hours and it will still run like it is overheating. It does this randomly.

Here's another example of it detecting it as an older revision and it running slow but the cores are not being throttled.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
So far so good! Just have to keep in mind they only got a brief time with them. I'm sure the reviews will tell us.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] vido.ardes:
Bit of misinformation here, every phone that had used an 810 had used the v2.1 revision, it's not new. There is nothing about the chip that is in the 6P that is any different from the Z3+.

The good news is that other people have used the chip and its fine, don't even used it again in the z5. The issues had with the Z3 seem to be fifteen to a specific implementation rather than an inherent problem with the chip.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] dontbeweakvato:
[MENTION=4517211]Xileforce[/MENTION] maybe this is the nexus where 'hardware cooling mods' threads become popular.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cb474:
I wonder if it's too much to hope that here will be an updated version of this phone with the 820?

It just seems dumb that the first 820 phones will probably come out in January, only two months after people first start getting the 6P. Except for the early adopters, most people probably won't even start buying this phone until the holidays or into January anyway.

I understand that a lot of phone makers were screwed by Qualcomm and had to release phones this year, so they just made due with the 810 and it's problems. But we're really at the end of the 810's life now. To ship a high profile flagship phone with this hobbled chipset doesn't make much sense.
[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Xileforce:
Lol. Like the poor guys with the z3+ using aluminum foil xD

---------- Post added at 05:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:28 PM ----------

Yea is why I may wait for an 820 device. :/ what is odd to me is that the snapdragon 620, which as far as I know is already available for devices, wasn't used. It's faster than the 810 and should have less heat issues. It's 4x A72 which are faster and more efficient than the A57s and its still got the 4x A53s. Only downside is its under clocked from the factory. At least the nexus should be able to squeeze the most out of the 810 compared to other devices.