Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Samsung caught cheating in benchmarks again


The performance of a smartphone is often used in advertisements. The performance is measured using synthetic benchmark applications and it has recently bee revealed that the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is using illegal means to score higher in the benchmarks.

samsung benchmark cheat performance artificial
The recently released Apple iPhone 5S is known to have very high performance owing to its new A7 processor. Apple themselves claim that it is twice as fast as compared to iPhone 5, which is mostly confirmed by benchmarks. This apparently does not appeal to Samsung at all, who claims its new Galaxy Note 3 to be the fastest device on the market. However, Anandtech has discovered that the published data by Samsung are obtained through artificial manipulation of the performance in the Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

When a benchmark app is executed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, the CPU is overclocked which results in that it scores 23% higher than an iPhone 5S. However, by simply renaming the benchmarks to something else, Samsung Galaxy Note 3 will only score 2.3% higher than the iPhone 5S. Clearly, the engineers have implemented a special "benchmark mode".


Technically, this may not be an issue if other apps could utilize this "turbo" mode as well. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case, and this special turbo mode is only triggered by the use of designated benchmark apps with pre-defined names. Therefore, the conclusion is that Samsung purposely attempted to obtain higher benchmark performance scores through cheating. In essence, if the CPU was allowed to run at these high clock speeds all the time, the battery life would probably be horrible.

What makes matter worse is that this is not the first time Samsung has been caught cheating. The exact same artificial manipulation was found in conjunction to the release of the Samsung Galaxy S4 released earlier this year.


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