300 tests later, these phone makers were found to indeed cheat on benchmarks

Apple's #batterygate drama, on the other hand, showed it did the opposite - its chipsets are so overboard with power consumption on max performance, that they get throttled artificially because the peak demand can overwhelm an aging battery and shut down the iPhone.

When confronted, manufacturers argue that one can't really call this cheating, since everyone wants their product to be at its best when tested, and there is no actual overclocking from the official spec sheet maximums. Huawei even mentioned that its AI engine automatically puts the phone in the high-performance mode when it detects tough loads. A new report, however, tried to delve deeper into the phenomenon, running about both public and private versions of popular benchmarks... about 300 times on various phones.

Public means a version of AnTuTu or Geekbench taken off the Play Store, while private is the same apps provided by their creators, but under different names. Lo and behold, revving up the processor for benchmark purposes is indeed a thing, and some of the phones got so hot while running the public app, they could hardly be held in the palm, as you can see in the charts below. 

The problem seems to be that CPU throttling, which idles the cores to their minimum frequency when there's no workload, immediately goes to the backburner when popular benchmarking app names were recognized. Cheating, massaging the truth, whatever one calls it, the end result is that benchmarking companies and users alike aren't pleased, ruining some reputations in the long run for no good reason, as synthetic benchies aren't really indicative of a real-world performance.

source: FirstPost