Few months after the S4 was released, the
guys at AnandTech uncovered a fact that Samsung was 'gaming' the benchmark
scores by essentially leaving the phone's core at 'Full throttle' mode i.e. let
it function at it's maximum speed whenever some Benchmark apps were run. This
increased the benchmark score of the S4 and even the Note 3 marginally.
Months later, Samsung seems to have finally removed the 'Benchmark
Boosting Code' from its latest KitKat firmware updates for the S4 and the Note 3
according to some tests by the folks
at Arstechnica
The Benchmarks
Geekbench scores for S4 and Note 3 running Android 4.4.2 are
significantly lower than the ones running Android 4.3. Geekbench provided
Arstech’s investigators the benchmark scores from every single S4 and Note 3
device that ever benchmarked using Geekbench which makes the above score
pretty much undisputable.
Thus, we can safely conclude that Samsung has
removed the ‘booster’ code from both S4 and Note 3 which made them behave
indifferently to Benchmarking apps like Geekbench and Antutu.