Last year in March, Samsung was found guilty of thermally throttling around 10,000 apps on its Galaxy smartphones. The culprit was Samsung's new Game Optimizing Service (GOS) which was "optimizing gameplay" by essentially throttling or limiting the performance of other applications and tasks such that gaming is prioritized. This is meant to reduce heat output as well.

Interestingly, it was found that GOS did not include synthetic benchmark tests like 3DMark and Geekbench. Following this, the latter delisted several Galaxy devices, including the S22, the S21, S20, and, the S10 series of phones, as the Geekbench benchmark scores obtained by these phones wouldn't be representative of real-world scenarios.

Primate Labs, the makers of Geekbench, provided the following statement to Android Police:


Regardless, due to over-heating, the high-end Galaxy devices were probably thermal throttling a bit either way during benchmarks, even if GOS wasn't intentionally doing it.

The latest version of Geekbench, version 6.1, has made an interesting change regarding this issue as it has increased the workload gap between its various tests from two seconds up to five seconds. Geekbench explains that this has been done to reduce run-to-run variability.

The full changelog is given below:


As you may have noticed, Geekbench 6.1 is also expanding support for AVX-512 and it is going to greatly benefit the newer AMD Ryzen chips extend their dominance over Intel.