Pretty much any application, even these benchmarks, have enough variability in their workloads to have the processors of these devices ramping up and down a lot to save power at every opportunity under their actual power profiles. Simply eliminating that ramp-up time by maxing out the cores constantly will deliver a substantially higher level of performance on average (and require substantially more power, which is obviously why those power saving behaviors have to exist in the first place), without even needing to expose a higher peak frequency mode.
Finding sloppy sections within an article, even in relatively informative articles, isn't hard. Ars didn't provide the supporting info necessary to make their generalizations and summarizations about percent boosts "across the board" in the performance on other benchmarks (and, as mentioned, the variance already inherent in some of these benchmarks due to their poor design can add too much margin of error to their results to be useful when quoting a specific number), so that part of the article was easy to ignore.
Also, while acknowledging that their CPU Monitor didn't show any unusual CPU boosting going on in GfxBench 2.7, they made another unfounded claim that GPU boosting was clearly in effect because of the presence of the LCD frame rate adjust function. Sloppy again, since the section of code they had reproduced apparently showed that the function wasn't being applied to anything, yet the observation, as misinterpreted as it was by the author, highlights the specific path to boosting the GPU one way... interesting in itself.
Still, the actual code they reproduced, the specific testing they described, and the specific performance they measured was enlightening all by itself.
I wasn't aware that the device you and Anandtech were testing back in July was a Note 3.
The Ars piece was titled something like "Note 3 Benchmark Boosting Inflates Scores by Up to 20%" and was focused specifically on the Note 3. They appeared to have accurately measured and compared scores to a similarly CPU-binned S800 device in the G2. Whether or not they were aware that the G2 boosts in various benchmarks too was irrelevant to their specific point and findings, especially because they neither claimed nor implied that the G2 wasn't also guilty of boosting. It simply wasn't a topic within the focus of their Note 3 article.
Finding sloppy sections within an article, even in relatively informative articles, isn't hard. Ars didn't provide the supporting info necessary to make their generalizations and summarizations about percent boosts "across the board" in the performance on other benchmarks (and, as mentioned, the variance already inherent in some of these benchmarks due to their poor design can add too much margin of error to their results to be useful when quoting a specific number), so that part of the article was easy to ignore.
Also, while acknowledging that their CPU Monitor didn't show any unusual CPU boosting going on in GfxBench 2.7, they made another unfounded claim that GPU boosting was clearly in effect because of the presence of the LCD frame rate adjust function. Sloppy again, since the section of code they had reproduced apparently showed that the function wasn't being applied to anything, yet the observation, as misinterpreted as it was by the author, highlights the specific path to boosting the GPU one way... interesting in itself.
Still, the actual code they reproduced, the specific testing they described, and the specific performance they measured was enlightening all by itself.
I wasn't aware that the device you and Anandtech were testing back in July was a Note 3.
The Ars piece was titled something like "Note 3 Benchmark Boosting Inflates Scores by Up to 20%" and was focused specifically on the Note 3. They appeared to have accurately measured and compared scores to a similarly CPU-binned S800 device in the G2. Whether or not they were aware that the G2 boosts in various benchmarks too was irrelevant to their specific point and findings, especially because they neither claimed nor implied that the G2 wasn't also guilty of boosting. It simply wasn't a topic within the focus of their Note 3 article.
