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Apple Marketing SVP Phil Schiller calls out Samsung’s Note 3 benchmarking ‘shenanigans’

Apple Marketing SVP Phil Schiller has been known to take to Twitter in the past to voice his views on rival platforms, and today the Apple executive is once again taking a jab at Android through his Twitter account. Today, Schiller points us to some more Android “shenanigans” with a link to a story from ArsTechinca about inflated Galaxy Note 3 benchmarks.

Ars reports:

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 took another shot at Android on Twitter by tweeting the words “Be safe out there” with a link to a study showing a much higher number of threats on Android compared to iOS. Schiller isn’t the only Apple executive on Twitter as earlier this month CEO Tim Cook started communicating with customers for the first time through his official account. 

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Comments

  1. Quote from the page: “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.” Soo they still would have been top of the line without cheating. I don’t quite get it. The Tablet by Samsung is showing the same behaviour but I bet it doesn’t make a huge difference either.

  2. Laughing_Boy48 - 10 years ago

    That’s OK if the benchmarks are boosted. The Droidboyz really get off on high benchmarks. It’s a matter of pride to say, “Mine is faster than yours” when describing various Android devices. I’m not entirely sure why it would even matter to the average consumer user, but it certainly must matter to someone. Most high-end smartphones are plenty fast enough for 98% of average daily use.

    • Jurgis Šalna - 10 years ago

      Javascript performance is still 20x lower than the desktop computers. I don’t see how it doesn’t matter.

  3. William - 10 years ago

    Reblogged this on William's iBlog and commented:
    It’s not all about benchmarks, speeds, and feeds, people… Just saying.

Author

Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s Logic Pros series.