5 ms·

Note 3’s benchmarking “adjustments” inflate scores by up to 20%

103 points by AndrewDucker 13y ago

MBCook 13y ago
For clarification, Note 3 means Samsung Galaxy Note 3, not the name of a company that produces a benchmark (which was my first thought). Samsung is at it again. Doesn't matter if it's already a fantastic device, they still pull this kind of stuff.
fsniper 13y ago
I can't understand the issue here. If you are using a benchmarking app or a game that's heavy on the cpu, these same optimizations would kick in. So you will cry for the speed of the device while crying for the battery juice draining. What is the issue here?
- JonFish85 13y ago
  Would they actually, though? If these optimizations would kick in, why does Samsung feel the need to force the optimizations to kick in for specific apps, rather than via CPU usage like any other game/app?
  - epo 13y ago
    Because they are incapable of producing competitive products (their phone market is people who can't afford anything better or who are motivated by fanboyish prejudice) and because their corporate culture appears to emphasise cheating, deception and dishonesty above all other values. I mean really, even if you thought Android was a better solution why would you buy Samsung?
- tekacs 13y ago
  It appears, from the extracted code, to be the case that a 'special' (read: hardcoded) set of optimisations is being enabled solely for benchmarking apps. Whilst 'smart' behaviour might enable the phone to switch on some such functionality when the SoC/CPU is put under heavy load (by something such as a game), the effect of such automated switching is unlikely to have anything like the effect of a hardcoded force-to-high-power-mode as shown here.
  - wuliwong 13y ago
    And you know this based on what? "hardcoded" != "faster" It just guarantees that it will happen in that case. Unless you have some reason to believe that this mode is unattainable under any real world circumstance, I think the original point still has some credence.
    - Lagged2Death 13y ago
      If the mode were attainable in a realistic end-user scenario, there would be no point in detecting the benchmark tool in the first place. A high CPU load (like from a benchmark) would kick the CPU up into high performance mode and that would be that. I would guess that the high-performance mode drains the battery so quickly, or creates so much heat, that it's impractical for general use.
      - wuliwong 13y ago
        You would guess but you're probably wrong. The logic of your response is terribly flawed. Reboot and try again.
    - macspoofing 13y ago
      >And you know this based on what Based on the fact that they are Samsung. That they aren't transparent about what they are doing. That there is no evidence that these optimization kick in in other contexts. They are doing something to fuck around with benchmark numbers, the onus is on them to explain it and be upfront about it.
    - gibwell 13y ago
      It secretly 'guarantees' that the benchmarks don't run under real-world conditions. That is fraud.
- sp332 13y ago
  It's not about CPU-heavy apps. The cores change their clock speeds as soon as you open the benchmarking app, before you even run the benchmark.
  - fsniper 13y ago
    If that's the case, Samsung is doing direct manipulation on benchmarks and this is fraud.
    - sp332 13y ago
      Yes. That is the point of the article.
- macspoofing 13y ago
  >What is the issue here? The issue is that these 'optimizations' don't actually kick-in for non-benchmarking apps.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  It's only triggered if it is a benchmarking app. Did you read the article at all? They look at the name of the app running and if it matches the name of a benchmarking app, they shift into a mode that only exists for benchmarking apps.
devx 13y ago
I think it's a very misleading tactic, because then many customers buy based on those benchmarks. Ironically, I believe these smartphone OEM's are a lot less bad than PC OEM's/chip makers. I hate how Intel, Nvidia and AMD all "win benchmarks" or show numbers much higher than the practical limit of those chips. All of them seem to have a "base clock speed", and then a "turbo speed" that goes even up to twice as high. What do you think gets shown in the benchmarks? The base clock speed, that you'll be using most of the time? Of course not. It's the "turbo" burst speed that will be calculated by the benchmarks. This ends up being very misleading because for example I bought a laptop with an Nvidia GPU that was supposedly 3x faster than the integrated Intel one. But after about 30 minutes of playing a game, it will invariably get throttled to about half of that speed, and then it will only be 50 percent faster than the integrated one. Intel is even worse than this, because they're becoming more desperate about the ARM competition, they start to become increasingly more misleading to make the appearance that they're "closing the gap" with ARM much faster than they really are. Before I start, I want to say that I use a Core i7 in my laptop, but I just hate shameless misleading of consumers, whether it's from Intel, Nvidia, AMD or Samsung. There are 3 "misleading strategies" that Intel has used lately: 1) Turbo-boost, of course. Their new Atom chips are actually 1.3-1.5 Ghz, but they market them as 2-2.4 Ghz chips, a speed that also helps them do very well in CPU benchmarks (they're still about 2x behind any other ARM GPU, but I think they'll start using turbo speed for the Atom GPU's in the next generation, too, again to make it "seem" like they caught up - except not really). 2) Launching the most powerful version they have first, even if it's not going to be used in most of the devices the consumers want, but this way the press is all over it, and then the consumers remember that "brand" that was very powerful, even if it's not what they're getting in their device. Example: Haswell's Iris Pro. It was the first to be sent to sites and benchmark, and it showed much bigger GPU performance than before in laptops. The only problem? It's probably never going to be in a laptop. It was meant for PC's mostly, and again as a "halo product", to make people think that "Haswell is very powerful". In fact most laptops have only seen about 20 percent increase in GPU performance with Haswell, compared to IVB. Second example: They launched Bay Trail first, the "tablet version", to make people think "how powerful Atom is" and that it's "good for smartphones", and then they will release Merrified for smartphones, half a year later (which would already put them behind competition), and probably even weaker than Bay Trail performance wise. But most consumers will just remember that Bay Trail was great in benchmarks (see 1, also), even that's not what they're getting. 3) They're starting to push the "SDP" measuring, so tech websites can start writing about and promoting their chips as "5W chips" or whatever, and hope that even if they're now using the SDP name after the power consumption number, they will eventually forget to mention it ("Intel's 5W chips", etc). SDP is nothing but an absolute shameless scam from Intel. They want to have their cake and eat it, too: a) declare super high performance with the burst speed that it's not practical at all for too long, and b) declare super low-power with SDP, even if the chips themselves can get a lot hotter than Intel is implying with SDP, especially if they start using the Turbo-Boost speed. These guys explain it a lot better than I could: http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/25/intel-keeps-up-the-unethical-sdp-scam-with-new-4-5w-parts/ http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/25/intel-keeps-up-the-unethi... http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/9/3856050/intel-candid-explains-misleading-7w-ivy-bridge-marketing http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/9/3856050/intel-candid-explai... If I can't use my laptop at the advertised clock speeds for more than 10-30 minutes continuously, then it's nothing but a scam, meant to fool consumers into thinking their chips are either a lot more powerful or a lot more efficient than they really are.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
hmottestad 13y ago
Samsung also has a screen brightness booster that only works when the brightness is being measured. [1] It also has a battery life extender for apps that measure battery life [2] Don't forget the wifi range extender that boosts up the wifi decibel [3] They also say their phones can use 16TB memory cards [4] And don't forget that their phone is the prettiest [5] 1-4: I'm just making things up. 5: When compared to a naked mole rat. So next time Samsung says anything about anything. Just remember that they are willing to stretch the truth more than the average company.
- simias 13y ago
  I'm sorry but I don't understand your point at all. Are you saying TFA makes up its claims?
jfb 13y ago
If people buy on easily gameable microbenchmarks, we should expect companies to game said microbenchmarks.
- wuliwong 13y ago
  Well said @jfb.
mercurial 13y ago
This is pathetic. And not even necessary: > The ironic thing is, even with the benchmark booster disabled, the Note 3 still comes out faster than the G2 in this test. If the intent behind the boosting was simply to ensure that the Note 3 came out ahead in the benchmark race, it doesn't appear to have been necessary in the first place. The Samsung phone division upper management and marketing team don't seem burdened by an overabundance of neither ethics nor common sense. Or maybe I'm just being naive.
- radley 13y ago
  There's another possible explanation: some Samsung head demanded an extra 20% in unobtainable improvements (maybe offered bonuses?), so the engineers found a quick and dirty way to make it happen.
  - bentcorner 13y ago
    Reminds me of this: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/
Kronopath 13y ago
Reminds me of how some old ATI graphics drivers detect whether you were running Quake 3, and turn down the graphics quality for the sake of better benchmarks. Renaming quake3.exe to quack3.exe would fool the detectors and skip these "optimizations".[1] [1] http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_radeon_8500_drivers/ http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_chea...
- dman 13y ago
  Nvidia has been caught doing exactly this multiple times. Same with intel compilers. Same with car makers who optimize for EPA testing conditions. Given a benchmark people will "optimize".
  - mikro2nd 13y ago
    Or... "Tell me how you measure me, and I'll tell you how I behave"
- diminish 13y ago
  Moreover. Weren't Oracle, Sybase, Ms SQL Server doing same type of optimizations just for benchmarking purposes since their beginnings?
- Pxtl 13y ago
  To be fair, Quake 3 fans are known for prioritizing frames-per-second beyond all other considerations. One could argue that tweaking the graphical quality for Q3 to encourage high framerates is just giving customers what they want.
  - moogleii 13y ago
    One could, but that'd be a stretch. It should be a discrete option left up to the user. If they're tweaking that much, they'll know or seek the knowledge on how to activate it themselves.
  - roc 13y ago
    Except this was done against the explicit graphics settings the customers had set and only for a handful of games that were regularly used as benchmarks. Customers who actually want framerate-beyond-all-else don't enable/would disable those settings in the first place. So if it were "giving the customer what they want" they'd have respected the customer's settings. What it actually was, was a simple recognition that people used "framerate at max quality" as a proxy for net card performance and an attempt to "game" such measures by not actually running at max quality, for those games that were common benchmarks.
yapcguy 13y ago
Devil's advocate here. >"the Note 3 CPU locks into 2.3GHz mode, the fastest speed possible, and none of the cores ever shut off." Good! I want to know what the maximum performance is from a benchmarking app. I don't know why regulars apps are unable to get the Note 3 to use all 4 cores. Perhaps they're not multi-threaded or they haven't enabled the right settings? Surely 3D games will access all cores? At the end of the day, Samsung wants the benchmarking to show the theoretical maximum. Other manufacturers may not be too bothered and are happy to show benchmarking of normal usage. It's like reading the specs on a car, you're never going to drive at 160 mph, but at least you know you could.
- Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  Because the OS is trying to balance performance and battery life. Saying I want to see the maximum performance is fine but they should also be forced to show how that impacts other elements of system performance. Personally I think it would be good to see two sets of benchmark typical and maximum, but the most important thing is that whatever scores are being shown are clear and honest and I think it's hard to say that these are.
  - mjs 13y ago
    I don't expect a benchmarking app to be throttled by the OS under any circumstances--ideally the benchmarking app would run on the raw hardware, with no second-guessing by the OS about whether it should be throttled because the battery is down to 10%, or because some other process would like some network or CPU, etc. The way this probably should work is that the benchmarking apps themselves have a flag telling the OS they want all cores at full power all of the time, instead of having to hardcode this list into the OS. (Perhaps this could be one of the permissions you have to accept when installing the app.)
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      Ironically, even without the benchmark boosting, the Note 3 is still faster than the LG G2.
Pxtl 13y ago
... could somebody please explain to Samsung's marketing department that they're a world-leader and not a sketchy fly-by-night knock-off company?
- macspoofing 13y ago
  You are what you are. If you read anything about the way Samsung is run (especially in South Korea), this is par for course.
- pwthornton 13y ago
  Samsung's entire business model is being a sketchy fly-by-night knock-off company. First it was Sony and other Japanese electronics makers and now it is Apple. And I don't think Samsung would really deny it. They're pretty good at what they do. Somewhere along the way they became a huge global company that makes a lot of money, but they forgot that they need to start acting like one. They don't need to fake benchmarks or anything like this. They are the main event when it comes to Android. Samsung is who we thought they were: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw5UWqpcsDs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw5UWqpcsDs
  - gibwell 13y ago
    Why do they need to act any different? Their current tactics are working very well.
Nursie 13y ago
Don't care. Mobile processors in all of the high-end handsets long ago surpassed my needs. As far as I'm concerned they are all now awesome and we're living in the future.
- gibwell 13y ago
  A good reason to find deliberate deception ok.
beauzero 13y ago
...and they thought they could get away with it.
Geee 13y ago
Mobile devices are energy/power-limited (battery life / chip temperature) and you always have to optimize between those and performance. Theoretically you can add performance as much as you'd like but with a huge power draw. Basically, all these benchmarks are meaningless without knowing the power draw.
YOSPOS 13y ago
Shocker.
NatW 13y ago
So, Samsung, the dominant (#1 manufacturer of mobile phones (Q2 2013 sales: 107 million, market share: 24.7%)[1]) has been caught unambiguously and intentionally deceiving the public on their product's performance. Approval of cheating marks a disgusting corporate culture. sources: [1] http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-worlds-top-10-mobile-phone-companies/20130821.htm http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-...
anonymous 13y ago
Question: why don't benchmark sites then install a third-party android distro and benchmark with that?

103 points by AndrewDucker 13y ago

For clarification, Note 3 means Samsung Galaxy Note 3, not the name of a company that produces a benchmark (which was my first thought). Samsung is at it again. Doesn't matter if it's already a fantastic device, they still pull this kind of stuff.

fsniper 13y ago

I can't understand the issue here. If you are using a benchmarking app or a game that's heavy on the cpu, these same optimizations would kick in. So you will cry for the speed of the device while crying for the battery juice draining. What is the issue here?

JonFish85 13y ago
Would they actually, though? If these optimizations would kick in, why does Samsung feel the need to force the optimizations to kick in for specific apps, rather than via CPU usage like any other game/app?
- epo 13y ago
  Because they are incapable of producing competitive products (their phone market is people who can't afford anything better or who are motivated by fanboyish prejudice) and because their corporate culture appears to emphasise cheating, deception and dishonesty above all other values. I mean really, even if you thought Android was a better solution why would you buy Samsung?
tekacs 13y ago
It appears, from the extracted code, to be the case that a 'special' (read: hardcoded) set of optimisations is being enabled solely for benchmarking apps. Whilst 'smart' behaviour might enable the phone to switch on some such functionality when the SoC/CPU is put under heavy load (by something such as a game), the effect of such automated switching is unlikely to have anything like the effect of a hardcoded force-to-high-power-mode as shown here.
- wuliwong 13y ago
  And you know this based on what? "hardcoded" != "faster" It just guarantees that it will happen in that case. Unless you have some reason to believe that this mode is unattainable under any real world circumstance, I think the original point still has some credence.
  - Lagged2Death 13y ago
    If the mode were attainable in a realistic end-user scenario, there would be no point in detecting the benchmark tool in the first place. A high CPU load (like from a benchmark) would kick the CPU up into high performance mode and that would be that. I would guess that the high-performance mode drains the battery so quickly, or creates so much heat, that it's impractical for general use.
    - wuliwong 13y ago
      You would guess but you're probably wrong. The logic of your response is terribly flawed. Reboot and try again.
  - macspoofing 13y ago
    >And you know this based on what Based on the fact that they are Samsung. That they aren't transparent about what they are doing. That there is no evidence that these optimization kick in in other contexts. They are doing something to fuck around with benchmark numbers, the onus is on them to explain it and be upfront about it.
  - gibwell 13y ago
    It secretly 'guarantees' that the benchmarks don't run under real-world conditions. That is fraud.
sp332 13y ago
It's not about CPU-heavy apps. The cores change their clock speeds as soon as you open the benchmarking app, before you even run the benchmark.
- fsniper 13y ago
  If that's the case, Samsung is doing direct manipulation on benchmarks and this is fraud.
  - sp332 13y ago
    Yes. That is the point of the article.
macspoofing 13y ago
>What is the issue here? The issue is that these 'optimizations' don't actually kick-in for non-benchmarking apps.
darkarmani 13y ago
It's only triggered if it is a benchmarking app. Did you read the article at all? They look at the name of the app running and if it matches the name of a benchmarking app, they shift into a mode that only exists for benchmarking apps.

devx 13y ago

I think it's a very misleading tactic, because then many customers buy based on those benchmarks. Ironically, I believe these smartphone OEM's are a lot less bad than PC OEM's/chip makers. I hate how Intel, Nvidia and AMD all "win benchmarks" or show numbers much higher than the practical limit of those chips. All of them seem to have a "base clock speed", and then a "turbo speed" that goes even up to twice as high. What do you think gets shown in the benchmarks? The base clock speed, that you'll be using most of the time? Of course not. It's the "turbo" burst speed that will be calculated by the benchmarks. This ends up being very misleading because for example I bought a laptop with an Nvidia GPU that was supposedly 3x faster than the integrated Intel one. But after about 30 minutes of playing a game, it will invariably get throttled to about half of that speed, and then it will only be 50 percent faster than the integrated one. Intel is even worse than this, because they're becoming more desperate about the ARM competition, they start to become increasingly more misleading to make the appearance that they're "closing the gap" with ARM much faster than they really are. Before I start, I want to say that I use a Core i7 in my laptop, but I just hate shameless misleading of consumers, whether it's from Intel, Nvidia, AMD or Samsung. There are 3 "misleading strategies" that Intel has used lately: 1) Turbo-boost, of course. Their new Atom chips are actually 1.3-1.5 Ghz, but they market them as 2-2.4 Ghz chips, a speed that also helps them do very well in CPU benchmarks (they're still about 2x behind any other ARM GPU, but I think they'll start using turbo speed for the Atom GPU's in the next generation, too, again to make it "seem" like they caught up - except not really). 2) Launching the most powerful version they have first, even if it's not going to be used in most of the devices the consumers want, but this way the press is all over it, and then the consumers remember that "brand" that was very powerful, even if it's not what they're getting in their device. Example: Haswell's Iris Pro. It was the first to be sent to sites and benchmark, and it showed much bigger GPU performance than before in laptops. The only problem? It's probably never going to be in a laptop. It was meant for PC's mostly, and again as a "halo product", to make people think that "Haswell is very powerful". In fact most laptops have only seen about 20 percent increase in GPU performance with Haswell, compared to IVB. Second example: They launched Bay Trail first, the "tablet version", to make people think "how powerful Atom is" and that it's "good for smartphones", and then they will release Merrified for smartphones, half a year later (which would already put them behind competition), and probably even weaker than Bay Trail performance wise. But most consumers will just remember that Bay Trail was great in benchmarks (see 1, also), even that's not what they're getting. 3) They're starting to push the "SDP" measuring, so tech websites can start writing about and promoting their chips as "5W chips" or whatever, and hope that even if they're now using the SDP name after the power consumption number, they will eventually forget to mention it ("Intel's 5W chips", etc). SDP is nothing but an absolute shameless scam from Intel. They want to have their cake and eat it, too: a) declare super high performance with the burst speed that it's not practical at all for too long, and b) declare super low-power with SDP, even if the chips themselves can get a lot hotter than Intel is implying with SDP, especially if they start using the Turbo-Boost speed. These guys explain it a lot better than I could: http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/25/intel-keeps-up-the-unethical-sdp-scam-with-new-4-5w-parts/ http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/25/intel-keeps-up-the-unethi... http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/9/3856050/intel-candid-explains-misleading-7w-ivy-bridge-marketing http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/9/3856050/intel-candid-explai... If I can't use my laptop at the advertised clock speeds for more than 10-30 minutes continuously, then it's nothing but a scam, meant to fool consumers into thinking their chips are either a lot more powerful or a lot more efficient than they really are.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

hmottestad 13y ago

Samsung also has a screen brightness booster that only works when the brightness is being measured. [1] It also has a battery life extender for apps that measure battery life [2] Don't forget the wifi range extender that boosts up the wifi decibel [3] They also say their phones can use 16TB memory cards [4] And don't forget that their phone is the prettiest [5] 1-4: I'm just making things up. 5: When compared to a naked mole rat. So next time Samsung says anything about anything. Just remember that they are willing to stretch the truth more than the average company.

simias 13y ago
I'm sorry but I don't understand your point at all. Are you saying TFA makes up its claims?

jfb 13y ago

If people buy on easily gameable microbenchmarks, we should expect companies to game said microbenchmarks.

wuliwong 13y ago
Well said @jfb.

mercurial 13y ago

This is pathetic. And not even necessary: > The ironic thing is, even with the benchmark booster disabled, the Note 3 still comes out faster than the G2 in this test. If the intent behind the boosting was simply to ensure that the Note 3 came out ahead in the benchmark race, it doesn't appear to have been necessary in the first place. The Samsung phone division upper management and marketing team don't seem burdened by an overabundance of neither ethics nor common sense. Or maybe I'm just being naive.

radley 13y ago
There's another possible explanation: some Samsung head demanded an extra 20% in unobtainable improvements (maybe offered bonuses?), so the engineers found a quick and dirty way to make it happen.
- bentcorner 13y ago
  Reminds me of this: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

Kronopath 13y ago

Reminds me of how some old ATI graphics drivers detect whether you were running Quake 3, and turn down the graphics quality for the sake of better benchmarks. Renaming quake3.exe to quack3.exe would fool the detectors and skip these "optimizations".[1] [1] http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_radeon_8500_drivers/ http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_chea...

dman 13y ago
Nvidia has been caught doing exactly this multiple times. Same with intel compilers. Same with car makers who optimize for EPA testing conditions. Given a benchmark people will "optimize".
- mikro2nd 13y ago
  Or... "Tell me how you measure me, and I'll tell you how I behave"
diminish 13y ago
Moreover. Weren't Oracle, Sybase, Ms SQL Server doing same type of optimizations just for benchmarking purposes since their beginnings?
Pxtl 13y ago
To be fair, Quake 3 fans are known for prioritizing frames-per-second beyond all other considerations. One could argue that tweaking the graphical quality for Q3 to encourage high framerates is just giving customers what they want.
- moogleii 13y ago
  One could, but that'd be a stretch. It should be a discrete option left up to the user. If they're tweaking that much, they'll know or seek the knowledge on how to activate it themselves.
- roc 13y ago
  Except this was done against the explicit graphics settings the customers had set and only for a handful of games that were regularly used as benchmarks. Customers who actually want framerate-beyond-all-else don't enable/would disable those settings in the first place. So if it were "giving the customer what they want" they'd have respected the customer's settings. What it actually was, was a simple recognition that people used "framerate at max quality" as a proxy for net card performance and an attempt to "game" such measures by not actually running at max quality, for those games that were common benchmarks.

yapcguy 13y ago

Devil's advocate here. >"the Note 3 CPU locks into 2.3GHz mode, the fastest speed possible, and none of the cores ever shut off." Good! I want to know what the maximum performance is from a benchmarking app. I don't know why regulars apps are unable to get the Note 3 to use all 4 cores. Perhaps they're not multi-threaded or they haven't enabled the right settings? Surely 3D games will access all cores? At the end of the day, Samsung wants the benchmarking to show the theoretical maximum. Other manufacturers may not be too bothered and are happy to show benchmarking of normal usage. It's like reading the specs on a car, you're never going to drive at 160 mph, but at least you know you could.

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
Because the OS is trying to balance performance and battery life. Saying I want to see the maximum performance is fine but they should also be forced to show how that impacts other elements of system performance. Personally I think it would be good to see two sets of benchmark typical and maximum, but the most important thing is that whatever scores are being shown are clear and honest and I think it's hard to say that these are.
- mjs 13y ago
  I don't expect a benchmarking app to be throttled by the OS under any circumstances--ideally the benchmarking app would run on the raw hardware, with no second-guessing by the OS about whether it should be throttled because the battery is down to 10%, or because some other process would like some network or CPU, etc. The way this probably should work is that the benchmarking apps themselves have a flag telling the OS they want all cores at full power all of the time, instead of having to hardcode this list into the OS. (Perhaps this could be one of the permissions you have to accept when installing the app.)
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    Ironically, even without the benchmark boosting, the Note 3 is still faster than the LG G2.

Pxtl 13y ago

... could somebody please explain to Samsung's marketing department that they're a world-leader and not a sketchy fly-by-night knock-off company?

macspoofing 13y ago
You are what you are. If you read anything about the way Samsung is run (especially in South Korea), this is par for course.
pwthornton 13y ago
Samsung's entire business model is being a sketchy fly-by-night knock-off company. First it was Sony and other Japanese electronics makers and now it is Apple. And I don't think Samsung would really deny it. They're pretty good at what they do. Somewhere along the way they became a huge global company that makes a lot of money, but they forgot that they need to start acting like one. They don't need to fake benchmarks or anything like this. They are the main event when it comes to Android. Samsung is who we thought they were: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw5UWqpcsDs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw5UWqpcsDs
- gibwell 13y ago
  Why do they need to act any different? Their current tactics are working very well.

Nursie 13y ago

Don't care. Mobile processors in all of the high-end handsets long ago surpassed my needs. As far as I'm concerned they are all now awesome and we're living in the future.

gibwell 13y ago
A good reason to find deliberate deception ok.

beauzero 13y ago

...and they thought they could get away with it.

Geee 13y ago

Mobile devices are energy/power-limited (battery life / chip temperature) and you always have to optimize between those and performance. Theoretically you can add performance as much as you'd like but with a huge power draw. Basically, all these benchmarks are meaningless without knowing the power draw.

YOSPOS 13y ago

Shocker.

NatW 13y ago

So, Samsung, the dominant (#1 manufacturer of mobile phones (Q2 2013 sales: 107 million, market share: 24.7%)[1]) has been caught unambiguously and intentionally deceiving the public on their product's performance. Approval of cheating marks a disgusting corporate culture. sources: [1] http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-worlds-top-10-mobile-phone-companies/20130821.htm http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-...

anonymous 13y ago

Question: why don't benchmark sites then install a third-party android distro and benchmark with that?