After carrying
out extended tests on the newly released Samsung Galaxy Note 3 phablet, tech
blog Ars Technica has concluded that Samsung programmed the device to feign a
better performance than other devices of similar specifications.
Ars Technica’s
Ron Amadeo discovered that Galaxy Note 3 performed far better than a similar
spec LG G2 smartphone during benchmark tests despite both having a 2.3GHz
Snapdragon 800 processor.
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| Galaxy Note 3 |
This led to
some digging and it was later discovered that Note 3 has an enhanced CPU mode
that is activated whenever a benchmark application is running on it. This CPU
mode makes the device run at the maximum 2.3GHz which in turn boost the
performance recorded by the benchmark app.
“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.”
Amadeo said in the post.
The problem
though is that this is not the way it runs normal apps. The implication of this
is that benchmark apps give inflated scores of about 20% to consumers/analysts
while the phablet performs lower than the scores when operating normal apps.
It was
discovered that a java program was installed in the android device which
includes the names of popular benchmark apps like Geekbench, Quadrant and Antutu.
The name of the benchmark app being used was changed to a name that was not
programed onto Note 3, the benchmark results gave a lower score compared to the
initial data by Geekbench.
Samsung was
previously accused of the same issue with its Galaxy S4 smartphone but it was
denied with the excuse that the CPU mode could be activated by other heavy apps
on the phone and not only benchmark apps.
Samsung has
yet to reply to the accusation by Ars Technica but it seems this allegation if
true, could make people skeptical of high benchmark scores of future Samsung
devices. Ars Technica also noted that it suspects the same issue with the Note
10.1 and will bring more details about it later.
Samsung has
only drawn unneeded attention to something consumers rarely take note of. Even
in the normal mode, Galaxy Note 3 still outperformed LG G2 (maybe because of
Note 3’s 3GB RAM to LG G2’s 2GB RAM) but it seems Samsung was not satisfied
with that.
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Who cares? The performance of the Note 3 is top-notch and there's hardly anything to complain about.
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