Samsung has been accused of using a special, high-power CPU mode in its Galaxy Note 3 handset to boost benchmark results by up to 20 per cent over rival devices with the same hardware.
Samsung's latest flagship handset is, as is usual for the company, available with different processors in different countries. Here in the UK, the device uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core chip running at 2.3GHz - the same as the US edition. This makes it incredibly fast, but the company stands accused of using software-based tweaks to artificially boost its benchmark scores to gain the upper hand in reviews.
According to research carried out by Ars Technica, the Galaxy Note 3 looks for a selection of the most common Android benchmarking applications (Quadrant, Antutu, Linpack, GLBenchmark, Coremark, Nenamark, Passmark Mobile, Caffeinemark and more) and locks the quad-core processor into a high-power mode in which all four cores are active and set to their highest-possible speeds.
That is in direct contrast with the handset's usual mode of operation, which sees individual cores in the processor shut off when not required in order to conserve power, while any running cores are dynamically scaled up and down to adjust the speed with a view to again reducing the overall power draw.
The result is that benchmarks running on the Galaxy Note 3 may report scores some 20 per cent higher than the handset is actually capable of under normal use. As evidence, the site modified a benchmark to change the name, thus bypassing Samsung's benchmark-detecting code, and found the reported score dropped dramatically.
This isn't the first time Samsung has been accused of cheating in benchmarks, having put similar 'optimisations' into the international, but not US, versions of the Galaxy S4. This is, however, the first time it has done so on a US model.
Andoid Games
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