Qualcomm responds to supposed allegations of cheating on benchmarks by MediaTek

There has been a controversy raging, concerning a recent discovery made by AnandTech that accused chip manufacturer MediaTek of cheating on performance benchmarks. Reportedly, MediaTek’s processors identified certain benchmarks and automatically enabled “sports mode” that delivered better than everyday use performance at the expense of battery life.

In response to the accusations of cheating, MediaTek published an announcement, explaining that the company follows industry-accepted standards in regards to benchmarks. Additionally, the blog post stated that “our key competitor has chipsets that operate in the exact same way”, and therefore, without pointing the finger directly towards Qualcomm, made us look that way.

Apple, Huawei and Samsung make processors for their own devices and Samsung only occasionally sells chips to other smartphone vendors, and that really leaves only Qualcomm as the aforementioned “key competitor” to the Taiwan-based company.

That accusation, however, elicited a reaction from Qualcomm and without naming MediaTek as an accuser, the company said in a statement to Android Authority that they do not perform whitelisting of benchmarks. Whitelisting is a technique of using an app name to determine whether to put a device into performance enhancement mode and is considered cheating on benchmarks. Qualcomm additionally stated that such a behavior defies the objective of a benchmark, which is to test how a device or a chipset will handle everyday use.