They’re (Almost) All Dirty: The State of Cheating in Android Benchmarks
Thanks to AndreiF7’s excellent work on discovering it, we kicked off our investigations into Samsung’s CPU/GPU optimizations around the international Galaxy S 4 in July and came away with a couple of conclusions:
1) On the Exynos 5410, Samsung was detecting the presence of certain benchmarks and raising thermal limits (and thus max GPU frequency) in order to gain an edge on those benchmarks, and
2) On both Snapdragon 600 and Exynos 5410 SGS4 platforms, Samsung was detecting the presence of certain benchmarks and automatically driving CPU voltage/frequency to their highest state right away. Also on Snapdragon platforms, all cores are plugged in immediately upon benchmark detect.
More: AnandTech
We started piecing this data together back in July, and even had conversations with both silicon vendors and OEMs about getting it to stop. With the exception of Apple and Motorola, literally every single OEM we’ve worked with ships (or has shipped) at least one device that runs this silly CPU optimization.