Samsung Caught Boosting International Galaxy S4 Benchmarks

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Samsung recently came out with a new version of the popular Galaxy S4 for international markets. The updated phone, powered by a new processor, boasted of amazing performance, almost seeming unrealistic. Powered by a new Exynos 5 Octa system on a chip, the international version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 performed impressively in benchmark tests — a graphical processing unit that runs at 532 megahertz and a central processing unit that tops out at 1.2GHz.

 

However, Samsung got caught in a lie about the performance of the new phone after basically gaming a piece of software to show the phone as faster than it actually is.
When people over at AnandTech started sifting through data for two Exynos octacore variants of the Galaxy S 4, they discovered that multiple benchmarks that appear to run those devices at higher CPU and GPU clock speeds than they normally run. Some of the apps included in the report are GLBench 2.5.1, AnTuTu, Quadrant and Linpack. Incidentally, they also found a string of code called ‘Benchmark Booster’ that apparently allowed the international Galaxy S4 to trick the benchmarking software into reporting higher speeds. The encoded ‘Benchmark Booster’ pulled this off by allowing the phone to operate at speeds no real world user or app would ever have access to.

 

Samsung has created within the Exynos 5 Octa-based Galaxy S4 a white list for certain benchmarking apps that allows them — and only them — to take advantage of the full power of the chipset. When the device detects that a white-listed benchmark app is running, it shifts into a high-performance mode not available to ‘real world’ applications.
In other words, Samsung has optimized the Galaxy S4 to perform better in the lab than it does in the real world, enabling full-speed GPU performance only while running specific benchmarks, and maxing out CPU performance, as well.
What Samsung needs to do going forward, is either open up these settings for all users or applications (offer a configurable setting that fixes the CPU governor in a high performance mode, and unlocks the 532MHz GPU frequency) or remove the optimization altogether. However, it’s interesting to note that Samsung refused to comment to reporters on the scandal.