Slashdot Mirror
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 benchmark software should randomize the process name on launch
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
It's not a mid-range device. It's only mid-range if you look at the spec sheet and nothing else. Its (non-gamed) benchmarks are actually pretty good for all this talk of 'mid-range'. They did the same thing Apple did and tried to balance out performance with battery life. They didn't put the biggest screen in it, and they have optimised silicon to listen for commands without keeping the CPU on all the time.
Specs aren't the war that anyone should be trying to win in the mobile space. That kind of thinking is why there are phones that only last half the day.