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Samsung Caught Boosting Galaxy S4 Benchmarks

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-that-you-should-buy-a-phone-for-its-benchmarks dept.

A recent forum post at Beyond3D made an interesting claim: that the Samsung Galaxy S4's GPU ran at 532 MHz for certain whitelisted benchmark applications, and at 480 MHz for everything else. The folks at AnandTech decided to investigate and found out that the phone does indeed let its GPU run at a higher frequency when particular benchmark software is running. They found a similar oddity with the CPU — it wasn't restricted for other apps, but it was forced to run at max speed during benchmarks. Then they decided to look for direct evidence that this was intentional. "Poking around I came across the application changing the DVFS behavior to allow these frequency changes – TwDVFSApp.apk. Opening the file in a hex editor and looking at strings inside (or just running strings on the .odex file) pointed at what appeared to be hard coded profiles/exceptions for certain applications. The string 'BenchmarkBooster' is a particularly telling one. ... Quadrant standard, advanced, and professional, linpack (free, not paid), Benchmark Pi, and AnTuTu are all called out specifically. Nothing for GLBenchmark 2.5.1 though, despite its similar behavior."

3 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Government Regulation by ElementOfDestruction · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When every sixth topic on Slashdot is about the evils and perils of Government Regulation, why are we constantly seeing examples of companies misleading, blatantly lying, to their customers? We need more teeth on consumer regulation. I bought my Samsung Galaxy S4 on certain assumptions of power. Remember Hyundai blatantly lying about their fuel numbers for half a decade? They were doled out a punishment, but the boost in sales due to in part by their chain-wide efficiency offset any net losses.

    Slashdot readers will remember this, and probably choose an S4 when faced with so few choices. Samsung sees no benefit to not skewing numbers in the future.

    1. Re:Government Regulation by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And Samsung still wouldn't care, evidenced by past behavior (otherwise known as the best predictor of future behavior):

      Samsung could face 15B Euro fine
      Samsung, LG fined for LCD price fixing
      Tax evasion, bribery, and price fixing: how Samsung became the giant that ate Korea
      Samsung agrees to plead guilty to DRAM price fixing, pay $300M fine
      6 Samsung executives headed to jail for price fixing
      Samsung, LG fined for mobile price fixing scheme

      Everyone is holding these guys up to be some kind of saints in their battle against the evil Apple Empire, when they are thrice-convicted price fixers that screw their customers over at every opportunity, legal or otherwise; and try to screw the competition by suing over standards-essential patents that they don't license for FRAND terms (allegedly).

      Samsung is not a friendly company, but I'll likely be modded down for saying so. Whatever, I've got the karma to burn.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  2. Re:And you think they're the only one why? by whisper_jeff · · Score: 5, Informative

    It doesn't. Other applications can run at 533mhz...

    No. They can't. Please try reading the article.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/7187/looking-at-cpugpu-benchmark-optimizations-galaxy-s-4

    ...all other apps/games were limited to 480MHz.

    Other applications can NOT run at 533. The only applications that have access to that speed boost are benchmark apps.

    The ONLY apps.

    Please read the article before you continue spreading your misinformation.