Samsung cheating in mobile benchmarks?

News has hit the web that Samsung may be cheating in mobile benchmarks to boost scores of its newest SoC, the Exynos 5 Octa. It seems the chip typically runs at 480MHz, but when running GLBenchmark 2.5.1, AnTuTu, or Quadrant, the Galaxy S4's operating system automatically overclocks the chip to run at 532MHz. AnandTech discovered that some of the S4's operating system support files contain a series of strings that allow for top performance for some apps and not others, including one with a particularly telling name: "BenchmarkBooster".

Digging into the Galaxy S 4's operating system support files, they came upon one with the name TwDVFSApp.apk, and since DVFS is short for dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (and, The Reg opines, "Tw" might be shorthand for "tweaking"), they opened it up in a hex editor and – behold! – in it were a list of what appeared for all the world to be a series of strings that allowed for top performance for some apps and not others, and a group-identification string with a rather incriminating name.

"The string 'BenchmarkBooster' is a particularly telling one," they write.

The gun may not be belching great clouds of damning smoke, but there's more than a mere wisp emanating from its barrel. As the AnandTech duo put it, "This seems to be purely an optimization to produce repeatable (and high) results in CPU tests, and deliver the highest possible GPU performance benchmarks."

This isn't the first case of strange benchmark results in the mobile processor market. A couple of weeks ago it was discovered that AnTuTu was unfairly optimized towards Intel CPUs.

Source: The Register