When we reviewed Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3 back in October, we noticed that it was doing something funny. Launching most benchmarking applications would kick the phone’s CPU into overdrive, forcing all CPU cores to run at their maximum rated speeds for as long as the application was open. Maxing out the CPU frequencies threw a wrench in our standard suite of tests, inflating some benchmark scores by around 20 percent. This wasn’t the first time Samsung had been caught, um, “enhancing” the performance of its hardware—AnandTech had discovered similar CPU and GPU optimizations in the international version of the Galaxy S4 two months before. However, this was the first time we had seen it show up in the North American version of one of Samsung’s phones. Even worse, as Samsung rolled the Android 4.3 update out to its older phones, other phones all began to exhibit the same behavior.
Read the full story — and see the full findings — at Ars Technica.