Samsung caught fudging benchmarks (again)

Summary: Benchmarkgate continues as Samsung is caught giving inflated benchmark scores to Note 3 via popular benchmarking app.

According to a post at Ars Technica, Samsung got caught with its hand in the cookie jar – again. It appears that the company is shamelessly falsifying benchmark scores of its Galaxy Note 3 to make it appear faster than it actually is. 

In July 2013 Samsung was caught boosting benchmarks on the international Galaxy S4. AnandTech found that the international versions of the phone would run the phone's GPU at 533MHz for certain popular benchmarks while limiting actual games to a slightly lower 480MHz.

This time, while testing the new Galaxy Note 3, Ars noticed something "fishy going on" because Samsung's 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 was blowing the doors off LG's 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800. "What makes one Snapdragon so different from the other?"

Shenanigans. That's what.

It turns out that Samsung is artificially boosting the Note 3's benchmark scores by 20 percent with a special, "high-power CPU mode" that kicks in when the device runs a large number of popular benchmarking apps, like the popular Geekbench app. 

Photo: Ars Technica

According to Ars:

Normally, while the Note 3 is idling, three of the four cores shut off to conserve power; the remaining core drops down to a low-power 300MHz mode. However, if you load up just about any popular CPU benchmarking app, the Note 3 CPU locks into 2.3GHz mode, the fastest speed possible, and none of the cores ever shut off.

I can't wait to hear Samsung explain this one.

Jason O'Grady is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 17 years.