Phil Schiller Calls Out Samsung’s Benchmarking ‘Shenanigans’ On Twitter
by Brent Dirks
October 1, 2013
Apple’s most prolific Twitter user, Phil Schiller, has taken to the service once again to trash rival Samsung.
Earlier today, the senior vice president of worldwide marketing linked to an interesting Ars Technica report that shows how Samsung is artificially inflating benchmarking scores by up to 20 percent on its new Galaxy Note 3 phablet.
Schiller added only one word to the link: shenanigans.
shenanigans http://t.co/30FoQDfNw0 — Philip Schiller (@pschiller) October 1, 2013The entire report is an interesting read, but here’s a small sample:
We noticed an odd thing while testing the Samsung Galaxy Note 3: it scores really, really well in benchmark tests—puzzlingly well, in fact. A quick comparison of its scores to the similarly-specced LG G2 makes it clear something fishy is going on, because Samsung's 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 blows the doors off LG's 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800. What makes one Snapdragon so different from the other? After a good bit of sleuthing, we can confidently say 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. Samsung did something similar with the international Galaxy S 4's GPU, but this is the first time we've seen the boost on a US device. We also found a way to disable this special CPU mode, so for the first time we can see just how much Samsung's benchmark optimizations affect benchmark scores.Earlier this year, Schiller used Twitter to link to a third-party report from F-Secure that examined the state of security on mobile devices. In 2012, 79 percent of the detected mobile malware was on Android compared with 0.7 percent on iOS. On launch day for both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook took time to make his first tweet after visiting a store in Palo Alto, Calif. Since then, he has retweeted comedian Conan O’Brien and thanked customers for the launch weekend sales numbers.
