Somewhat related, I had some fun with the K3V2 SoC on Huawei's Ascend P6. It wasn't the best by any measure, far from it, but I liked it, just because it was extremely easy to modify everything.

They advertised it as having a 1.5GHz CPU, but the governor was set up to practically never let it go beyond 1.2 GHz - most of the time it would top at 1GHz. Shenanigans.

The clock/voltage configuration for everything (CPU, GPU, RAM, some other stuff) was stored in a password protected Excel file (.xls!), and removing the protection was laughably easy. The kernel would compile with the data directly from that file, I haven't seen that before.

I was able to play with the settings to my heart's content. I got the CPU to run at a real 1.8Ghz, at which point the phone would literally burn through the battery at around 1% per second under full load. Of course, it would get extremely hot and shutdown in about half a minute :D

I got that phone super optimized, custom CPU,GPU and RAM clocks and voltages, got an extra hour of screen on time out of it and it was smooth as hell, a stark change from the default settings.

The damn GPS wouldn't work while moving though, which was pretty ridiculous.