Note 3’s Benchmarking “Adjustments” Inflate Scores ⇥ arstechnica.com

Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica:

Above is a picture of Geekbench and of Stealthbench, which is identical to Geekbench in every way except for a different package name. With Geekbench, System Monitor shows the CPU is locked into 2.3 GHz mode and all cores are active, but in Stealthbench, the CPU is allowed to idle, shut off cores, and switch power modes, the same way it does in any other app. We have successfully disabled the special benchmark mode.

Busted.

This special high-power mode is not like Turbo Boost on Intel Core CPUs: Intel’s mode kicks in for any app which requires extra performance, while Samsung’s only kicks in for benchmarking tools. Benchmark scores are not definitive (and aren’t always relevant, really) but Samsung seems intent on juicing their results.