[Samsung Galaxy J5 (2016) ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries] prototype74:
I agree with you that overclocking the snap 410 in our galaxy phones is fake. I did run some geekbench tests and compared my results with other Samsung msm8916 devices that are clocked higher than 1.2ghz on geekbench browser. Also I asked people in my TG group to run geekbench tests to compare with too. The result: all these geekbench tests (with different cpu/gpu freqs) had almost the same score given for single and multi core. So that means overclocking the snap 410 gives literally no noticeable performance boost.

I don't know if this helps you in any way but I'm currently updating the device tree for my J5 2016 and noticed something that you may be interested. Back in 2014 the codeaurora team updated the maximum frequency for the snap 410 from 1.19ghz to 1.21ghz as you can see it in this commit. That's also the timing where the team introduced different speed bins into msm8916 as I mentioned about speed bin earlier in this post. During 2014 to first half of 2015 the team added more speed bins that are clocked up to 1ghz or even 1.36ghz. So today the (official) msm8916.dtsi includes the following freq tables by each speed bin:

...
qcom,speed0-bin-v0 =
< 0 0>,
< 200000000 1>,
< 400000000 2>,
< 533333000 3>,
< 800000000 4>,
< 998400000 5>,
< 1094400000 6>,
< 1152000000 7>,
< 1209600000 8>;

qcom,speed1-bin-v0 =
< 0 0>,
< 200000000 1>,
< 400000000 2>,
< 533333000 3>,
< 800000000 4>,
< 998400000 5>,
< 1094400000 6>,
< 1152000000 7>;

qcom,speed3-bin-v0 =
< 0 0>,
< 200000000 1>,
< 400000000 2>,
< 533333000 3>,
< 800000000 4>,
< 998400000 5>;

qcom,speed0-bin-v1 =
< 0 0>,
< 200000000 1>,
< 400000000 2>,
< 533333000 3>,
< 800000000 4>,
< 998400000 5>,
< 1094400000 6>,
< 1152000000 7>,
< 1209600000 8>;

qcom,speed2-bin-v1 =
< 0 0>,
< 200000000 1>,
< 400000000 2>,
< 533333000 3>,
< 800000000 4>,
< 998400000 5>,
< 1094400000 6>,
< 1152000000 7>,
< 1209600000 8>,
< 1363200000 9>;

qcom,speed3-bin-v1 =
< 0 0>,
< 200000000 1>,
< 400000000 2>,
< 533333000 3>,
< 800000000 4>,
< 998400000 5>;
...

I investigated a bit more to figure out how the speed bin is read by the kernel. The kernel reads the efuse(s) from msm8916 to determine which speed bin and pvs it has. Once figured out it will apply the correct freq table that the hardware is supported to. For example if your msm8916 has speed bin 0 and pvs 0, your max cpu freq will be 1.21ghz. I don't know why Samsung still uses only one cpu freq table (and obviously only has one speed bin to check) that's clocked up to 1.19ghz. Anyway I was curious to figure out which speed bin and pvs my J5 2016 has, so I checked with the stock table from Samsung first. That's the output:

[ 0.200133] [1: swapper/0: 1] clock-a7 b011050.qcom,clock-a7: No speed/PVS binning available. Defaulting to 0!

Apparently no speed bin and pvs binning available. So the driver always fall back to use the default cpu freq table (well there is only one, so what's left to lose?). Next I tried with the cpu freq tables from qcom and applied the required patches to clk, so the driver will be capable to read the efuse from my msm8916. The result:

[ 0.200666] [1: swapper/0: 1] clock-a7 b011050.qcom,clock-a7: Speed bin: 0 PVS Version: 1

So my J5 2016 has a speed bin of 0 and the pvs is 1. That means the kernel applies a different cpu freq table now (well the one it applies now is still the same to speed bin 0 and pvs 0 😂).

With some more reasearches I figured out there are different msm8916 parts out there with different speed bin and pvs versions and I think this might also be the case on Samsung's own devices. So using Qualcomm's freq tables also unlocks the true maximum speed of the targeted msm8916 part. So there is a chance that there are Samsung msm8916 powered devices out there with a higher max cpu speed than on stock. However, it's still a mystery why Samsung kept using 1.19Ghz as default. Possible reasons might be:

Samsung released some msm8916 devices before the new speeds were added. To avoid confusions why some galaxy devices with msm8916 have different max speeds, they decided to stick with the same max speed for all of their msm8916 powered devices

There is no noticeable performance boost for the customer (which is imo the case)

Customers would complain why Samsung decided to "overclock" their phones to 1.21Ghz so they had to stick with 1.19Ghz

Imo it may be better to use the freq tables from Qualcomm. It doesn't give any noticeable performance boost but the geekbench score for single core increases by at least 1-2 scores with the same voltages. As I said no noticeable boost but it doesn't harm to stick with the freq tables from Qualcomm 🙂

To summarize everything: the true max speed of msm8916 depends on the speed bin reported by the efuse (hardware-side). msm8916's maximum cpu speed is at 1.36Ghz (according to the device tree by Qualcomm). Also to mention: msm8916 devices powered with 1.36Ghz also have a faster gpu speed (465Mhz).

Anyway, if you're still interested to oc your snap 410 to feel it like snap 805 then you may know already the only device (idk if there are more) that is actually clocked to 1.36Ghz by stock is the Moto G3. Maybe it's worth it to figure out how Motorola managed it but my first guess would be it's the same speed bin story as I mentioned above.

Good luck and regards