Ars Technica dig up the devices’ suspicious benchmark scores and has given a detailed report about how Samsung has programmed the device to inflate the scores of benchmarking apps:
After a good bit of sleuthing, we can confidently say that Samsung appears to be artificially boosting the US Note 3’s benchmark scores with a special, high-power CPU mode that kicks in when the device runs a large number of popular benchmarking apps. Samsung did something similar with the international Galaxy S 4’s GPU, but this is the first time we’ve seen the boost on a US device. We also found a way to disable this special CPU mode, so for the first time we can see just how much Samsung’s benchmark optimizations affect benchmark scores.
But there was a challenge in getting the stats right. Ron had to trick the device from not entering into benchmark mode:
While it’s difficult to determine every bit of special programming that affects the CPU while a benchmark is running, one sure-fire way to see what’s going on is to trick the phone into not entering a special “benchmark mode” during a benchmark.
So intelligently, they had to rename the Geekbench app and trick the device to produce the original results:
So we slapped together “Stealthbench,” a renamed version of Geekbench 3. By disassembling the benchmarking app, changing only the package name, and reassembling it, we could run the app without the CPU knowing we were running a benchmark app. The Note 3 should treat our benchmark like any other app and give a true representation of the phone’s performance relative to other devices.
This is bad, Samsung. This is bad.
You can read the entire story from Ars Technica here. They’ve got some really good statistics about the devices’ original performance, and how bad Samsung has been behaving.