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How Many Android OEMs Cheat Benchmark Scores? Pretty Much All of Them
An anonymous reader writes "After Samsung got caught out cheating on benchmarks (Note 3, Galaxy S4) AnandTech has done a detailed analysis of the state of benchmark cheating amongst Android OEMs. With the exception of Motorola, literally every single OEM they've looked at ships (or has shipped) at least one device that does benchmark-specific CPU optimizations. AnandTech also thinks it will get worse before it gets better. 'The hilarious part of all of this is we’re still talking about small gains in performance. The impact on our CPU tests is 0 - 5%, and somewhere south of 10% on our GPU benchmarks as far as we can tell. I can't stress enough that it would be far less painful for the OEMs to just stop this nonsense and instead demand better performance/power efficiency from their silicon vendors.' The article notes that Apple doesn't do any of the frequency gaming stuff."
The phone manufacturers should not be dicks.
Even easier...don't use benchmarks which are easily rigged, choose real world applications and cook up some tests using them!
The problem is ALL the benchmarks have been rigged by somebody for ages...X86? Any benchmark compiled using ICC is rigged against AMD and boosts Intel by 30% (look up "Intel Cripple Compiler" if you want to learn more, end result is benchmarks are completely useless on X86 unless compiled with GCC) and as we see here ARM? Rigged by everybody. This kind of crap has been going on since "Quack.exe" and is why you shouldn't trust ANY benchmarks. I'll always remember one of the reviews before the guy was told about ICC when he was testing netbooks "These new netbooks with AMD seem to be MUCH snappier...yet it loses to the low end Atom by nearly 30%, and I just don't know why"...the reason why is the benchmarks are all rigged!
So if you want to bench an ARM chip? Root the phone, install Bash, and run a script that runs real applications in real world scenarios. there are more than enough apps out there that cooking up their own informal benches should NOT be hard and until they do? Just remember to replace the word benchmark with bullshit every time you see one of these articles.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you measure it, it gets better. Nobody ever stops to think why. They mostly just think they are good managers. But in fact, if you create a measuring tool to measure qualities of a device, the manufacturers will work to make that measurement better. If you make a measurement to determine how your employees are performing, they will perform better according to that measurement. That's just the way it works.
You can't measure everything, so you're best bet is to try to keep the measurement methods secret and change them frequently. Unless, of course, your measurements are intended to improve a particular area, then by all means, measure on.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
No, not really. Comparing iOS and Android directly on performance is silly. They're two totally different ecosystems and hard performance numbers don't change much. That's like a typical user picking a Mac or Windows PC because one performs 5% better at random tasks, ignoring the fact that the offerings between each machine is radically different and pure performance numbers are only a tiny part of the whole picture.
Apple has no reason to cheat because they have no competition that merits the risk of cheating on. It might have been a different story had iOS hardware been available from multiple vendors.