Samsung cheats at benchmarks

JHBThree

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The phone industry is designed and operated with the intent to make money. As much as it possibly can. And that includes Apple and HTC as much as it does Samsung. Why do people act surprised when they find out that Jesus and Mother Theresa are not the CEO's of these companies? There will ALWAYS be inner workings in EVERY company that you wont agree with. It doesn't make them the epitome of all evil, and it also doesn't make your company of choice the best there ever was. I get annoyed when these upper management figures do shady business. But I can't change it, and as long as the device works to my expectations, AnandTech isn't going to convince me that the companies want to sacrifice my firstborn.

See but that's the thing. Even though it benchmarks faster than the One or similar devices, its slower in day to day use. THAT'S one of the reason this matters. Then for Samsung to come out and straight up lie about what was going on. Well, it does a lot to unravel any perception that they have moved on from what they once were.
 

slackerjack

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There's no reason to turn this into a witch hunt guys, not after Samsung, not after HTC, certainly not after the mods here or Anandtech. This is purely an academic debate about SOC's...and benchmarks, and it matters largely only to the handful of us that are here talking about it....certainly not the thousands of users on this forum who looked at this topic and just went about their lives not caring, and to a larger degree...the gazillions of mobile user's that don't care to read tech sites...let alone run benchmarks on their mobile phones. Samsung is Samsung and making billions of dollars on their devices and conquering the space, HTC is in chaotic shambles despite making a great device... Apple is off doing Apple things and Blackberry is off...well..doing nothing. This "revelation" has had and will continue to change none of that... It's only tech nerds like us that care at all, some of us for d**k waggling rights, some because we like technology.. But that's as far as it goes...

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Kevin OQuinn

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I fear you're misunderstanding why they are complaining. It's all the notorious Samsung haters that have jumped on this. And if HTC was found to be doing it, all the HTC haters would be all over it. It's more about demonizing a company to some of these people than it is about the importance of honesty or true benchmark scores. This same crap happens in every thread that points out a negative aspect of whatever company.

No, it's about a company cheating, and then lying about it. Doesn't matter if it's htc, Samsung, Moto, etc....

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD
 

LegalAmerican

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No, it's about a company cheating, and then lying about it. Doesn't matter if it's htc, Samsung, Moto, etc....

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

I agree that the "cheating" is wrong. I would imagine they only felt the need to cheat to satisfy the jokers who make their purchase decision based off the benchmark score (not that that justifies it). But I will step out on a limb and say if the HTC One was the device this was happening with, it would be a whole different crop of complainers filling up the thread. Deep down I think you'd find that to be sound logic and agree. And that's the point i'm making.
 

LegalAmerican

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Even though it benchmarks faster than the One or similar devices, its slower in day to day use. .

The problem is though, people will always have different opinions of which device is "faster". I guarantee many S4 owners would say they tried the One and found the S4 to be more 'snappy' or whatever adjective you want. Just like One owners will say what you just did. So it boils down to whether or not you ACTUALLY put stock into that benchmark and care more about that than day to day usage. If the S4 scored lower than the One in testing, but felt faster in the hand would you mention that? People just use this as another flame war on Samsung. They light their pitchforks and gather the mob without even stopping to consider whether or not they really actually care.
 

Kevin OQuinn

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I agree that the "cheating" is wrong. I would imagine they only felt the need to cheat to satisfy the jokers who make their purchase decision based off the benchmark score (not that that justifies it). But I will step out on a limb and say if the HTC One was the device this was happening with, it would be a whole different crop of complainers filling up the thread. Deep down I think you'd find that to be sound logic and agree. And that's the point i'm making.

Yep, probably the same group that's in this thread saying "eh, it's not a big deal" lol

Who knows why they wanted to cheat. Logic tells me because they wanted to have the fastest benchmarks. I would imagine Samsung has done some research and knows a thing or two about marketing. I'm sure this ties in with that somehow.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk 4 Beta
 

Citizen Coyote

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There's no reason to turn this into a witch hunt guys, not after Samsung, not after HTC, certainly not after the mods here or Anandtech. This is purely an academic debate about SOC's...and benchmarks, and it matters largely only to the handful of us that are here talking about it....certainly not the thousands of users on this forum who looked at this topic and just went about their lives not caring, and to a larger degree...the gazillions of mobile user's that don't care to read tech sites...let alone run benchmarks on their mobile phones. Samsung is Samsung and making billions of dollars on their devices and conquering the space, HTC is in chaotic shambles despite making a great device... Apple is off doing Apple things and Blackberry is off...well..doing nothing. This "revelation" has had and will continue to change none of that... It's only tech nerds like us that care at all, some of us for d**k waggling rights, some because we like technology.. But that's as far as it goes...

Waiting now for the snarky comments during the next iPhone reveal about how Apple doesn't have to cheat their benchmarks. The average consumer may not care about this, but you can bet Apple's PR department is salivating with glee at the knowledge that Samsung got caught with its hand in the performance cookie jar, and the news is getting plastered on every tech site on the internet.
 

garublador

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How about this. The way I see it, a company "cheating" a benchmark is like a fast food restaurant using fake food in pictures. It's pretty much the standard practice, they're technically "lying" to customers but no one with any sense believes that they'll get what they see.
 

Aquila

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I think I don't care that they're cheating on benchmarks because, like everyone else, one sorta assumes that is happening.

I think the real issues are:

1. The company (Kevin is right, any company) outright lying about it afterwards. Their statements are demonstrably false.
2. The attitude of, to paraphrase, "I don't care that they're blatantly dishonest because _________________". (Insert, "I don't care about benchmarks, my phone is still fast, etc)
 

anon5664829

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Of course benchmarks don't matter anymore Samsung fanboys right? Right?
Samsung is stupid and will never buy a product from them.

Posted via Android Central App
 

slackerjack

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Waiting now for the snarky comments during the next iPhone reveal about how Apple doesn't have to cheat their benchmarks. The average consumer may not care about this, but you can bet Apple's PR department is salivating with glee at the knowledge that Samsung got caught with its hand in the performance cookie jar, and the news is getting plastered on every tech site on the internet.

I dunno, Apple can certainly take the high road here and just state "We actually care about game performance enough to not use standard GPU's and have a long standing history of pairing our CPU's with PVR amaze-balls gpu's that blow everything in the space out fo the water." Apple has had a smart gaming strategy from the get go - and spent the extra dollars where it matters most for gaming. To get into a pissing match with Samsung over this isn't going to affect enough buyers to count - they simply have to restate their position - "reference chips? - Nah...we go crazy" which is something that no Android vendor has really done up to this point, sans a sad set of attempts using Tegra 2 and 3 chips (the former being the worst possible solution for tablets, and to a lesser degree phone game performance - while the latter was competent - but aside from some graphical whiz bangs courtesy of Nvidia - not able to keep pace with the resolution war, as it'd turn out - and left behind as a result). God don't let this be interperted as me saying anything about Nvidia chips - they've got their advantage and disadvantages - but they're pretty far behind the other ARM candidates in terms of raw horsepower without tradeoffs. I think the Nvidia Tegra 4(and 4i) look more comparable to the modern language set, at least on paper, and I'm encouraged to see those devices start shipping in something other than the abortion that is Shield (don't get me started - timing, potential market size, price, etc make this a bad move on Nvidia's part).
 

smooth4lyfe

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This really shouldn't be too surprising to anyone...NO company plays fair because its all a competition between all of them.
Either way, I only care about how it feels to me, and to me its pretty damn fast no matter what benchmarks say
 

garublador

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I think I don't care that they're cheating on benchmarks because, like everyone else, one sorta assumes that is happening.

I think the real issues are:

1. The company (Kevin is right, any company) outright lying about it afterwards. Their statements are demonstrably false.
2. The attitude of, to paraphrase, "I don't care that they're blatantly dishonest because _________________". (Insert, "I don't care about benchmarks, my phone is still fast, etc)
I think the real issue is that people treat benchmarks as scientific material when it's really marketing material. Sure it sucks that marketing material is some of the least trustworthy information out there, but singling out one company for not being honest in marketing material is incredibly biased. Apple has run some of the most blatantly false marketing campaigns out there (remember the Mac and PC ads? About half of what they said was flat out wrong). If you claim you won't purchase products form companies that "lie" in this same way you'll have a really hard time finding stuff to buy and almost certainly won't have any electronic gadgets. Samsung is only guilty of getting caught. The real problem is the benchmark companies claiming what they're selling has anywhere near the precision they claim.
 

HalizDad

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I'm plenty happy with my S4.

I don't give a **** about silly articles/studies like these. It's just a phone folks, ya need to relax and not spend so much energy trying to bi*ch/complain about it.



Sent from my Nexus 7 using AC Forums mobile app

Of course you don't care...but if it was HTC doing it, all of you would be raising hell about it...
 

Kevin OQuinn

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I dunno, Apple can certainly take the high road here and just state "We actually care about game performance enough to not use standard GPU's and have a long standing history of pairing our CPU's with PVR amaze-balls gpu's that blow everything in the space out fo the water." Apple has had a smart gaming strategy from the get go - and spent the extra dollars where it matters most for gaming. To get into a pissing match with Samsung over this isn't going to affect enough buyers to count - they simply have to restate their position - "reference chips? - Nah...we go crazy" which is something that no Android vendor has really done up to this point, sans a sad set of attempts using Tegra 2 and 3 chips (the former being the worst possible solution for tablets, and to a lesser degree phone game performance - while the latter was competent - but aside from some graphical whiz bangs courtesy of Nvidia - not able to keep pace with the resolution war, as it'd turn out - and left behind as a result). God don't let this be interperted as me saying anything about Nvidia chips - they've got their advantage and disadvantages - but they're pretty far behind the other ARM candidates in terms of raw horsepower without tradeoffs. I think the Nvidia Tegra 4(and 4i) look more comparable to the modern language set, at least on paper, and I'm encouraged to see those devices start shipping in something other than the abortion that is Shield (don't get me started - timing, potential market size, price, etc make this a bad move on Nvidia's part).

Half your post is about nVidia chips, but we're supposed to ignore that? I'll just say this, Tegra 4 is impressive in SHIELD. Unless you've used one, you probably don't completely understand it. Just like everyone says about phones, try to withhold judgement until you've spent time with one. I've read all the reviews, and they're mostly positive, especially considering this is version one.

Ok, enough about that.

I agree that Apple has always managed to put top specs in their devices. It's impressive, really. I do give them kudos for that, and am glad that Android manufacturers are starting to take notice and care. Now, we just need to get the software side of things up to par. As much as I hate benchmarks (for the very reason this threads exists), optimizing software to run on hardware is the name of the game. We've seen it with Tegra games, we're starting to see it with specific Qualcomm stuff (can't remember the name of the game being optimized for the new Nexus 7....), and hopefully we see something done with the awesome power that is Mali somewhere in the future also. I've said it before, but great hardware really is nothing without great software backing it up.

/rant
 

LegalAmerican

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I would imagine Samsung has done some research and knows a thing or two about marketing. I'm sure this ties in with that somehow.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Maybe. But I have to wonder if Samsung REALLY is worried about cheating to sell an additional 5,000 devices to the tech nerds who think benchmarks are meaningful. I don't know that scoring lower on benchmarks would impact the 30+ Million devices they sell to the people who care more about real world use than numbers on a tech site. Maybe they do care a lot about the additional 5k, but I'm not sure.
 

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