They're (Almost) All Dirty: The State of Cheating in Android Benchmarks

Stefan Mileschin · 3rd October 2013, 11:40

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.

The first point applied exclusively to the Exynos 5410 equipped version of the Galaxy S 4. We did a lot of digging to confirm that max GPU frequency (450MHz) was never exceeded on the Snapdragon 600 version. The second point however applied to many, many more platforms.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/s...oid-benchmarks

3rd October 2013, 11:40	#1
Stefan Mileschin [M] Reviewer Join Date: May 2010 Location: Romania Posts: 148,500	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. The first point applied exclusively to the Exynos 5410 equipped version of the Galaxy S 4. We did a lot of digging to confirm that max GPU frequency (450MHz) was never exceeded on the Snapdragon 600 version. The second point however applied to many, many more platforms. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/s...oid-benchmarks

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