Tipped off by a report from hacker in Luxembourg that accused Samsung of increasing the clock speed of its Android-based Galaxy S 4 specifically, and only, when running certain benchmarks, AnandTech investigated and confirmed that it is indeed cheating to win in performance tests, by design.
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The site first confirmed that, in normal use, the Galaxy S 4's Exynos 5 Octa was running at 480MHz, noting, "Samsung never publicly claimed max GPU frequencies for the Exynos 5 Octa (our information came from internal sources), so no harm no foul thus far."
However, when running tests including GLBenchmark 2.5.1, AnTuTu and Quadrant, the device "triggers a GPU clock not available elsewhere: 532MHz."
The CPU side behaved similarly when running benchmarks, but it used maximum performance modes available to other apps. "The 532MHz max GPU frequency on the other hand," the report stated, "is only available to these specific benchmarks."
Digging into files in the software that controls the chip's frequency, AnandTech discovered "what appeared to be hard coded profiles/exceptions for certain applications," including the text string "BenchmarkBooster."
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