Hello everyone,
I’d like to share with you some information I’ve discovered about the behaviour of the CPU governor (Walt) on my Nothing 3a (Nothing OS 4.0). I should point out that we have three identical devices in the family and they all exhibit the same behaviour. Having immediately noticed slightly high battery consumption, I installed an app to monitor the CPU load and discovered that it never drops below 9%. On other smartphones from different manufacturers (I tested three different models running Android versions 11, 13 and 16 respectively), however, the minimum load can drop as low as 1%. So I noticed that the frequency never scaled down to the minimum available for my CPU (441 MHz) but remained at the second step (595 MHz).
At first, I thought it might be an error in the app’s load estimation. So I decided to investigate further using ADB commands to find out how much time the CPU spent at each frequency and what the minimum frequency set by the governor was. As you can see, the minimum frequency set by the governor is indeed 595 MHz (so it never drops to the minimum), and for the entire time the phone was switched on, it never entered the lowest frequency (441 MHz).
I should point out that this also occurs when the smartphone boots in safe mode, so I would rule out it being caused by any app I have installed. All the data I have provided relates to the E-core cluster, but as you can see from the images, the same applies to the H-core and P-core clusters and their respective frequencies.
Finally, on rare occasions, it can get stuck at a minimum of 24% at higher frequencies and doesn’t drop to the usual 9% until I restart the smartphone, resulting in increased battery consumption. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots of this at the moment.
I don’t know if this is normal behaviour intended by the developers, or why this is happening.
What do you think? I hope others will share their experiences too, and that this might be helpful to others.
Thank you all for reading.
