I think it's a very misleading tactic, because then many customers buy based on those benchmarks.

Ironically, I believe these smartphone OEM's are a lot less bad than PC OEM's/chip makers. I hate how Intel, Nvidia and AMD all "win benchmarks" or show numbers much higher than the practical limit of those chips.

All of them seem to have a "base clock speed", and then a "turbo speed" that goes even up to twice as high. What do you think gets shown in the benchmarks? The base clock speed, that you'll be using most of the time? Of course not. It's the "turbo" burst speed that will be calculated by the benchmarks.

This ends up being very misleading because for example I bought a laptop with an Nvidia GPU that was supposedly 3x faster than the integrated Intel one. But after about 30 minutes of playing a game, it will invariably get throttled to about half of that speed, and then it will only be 50 percent faster than the integrated one.

Intel is even worse than this, because they're becoming more desperate about the ARM competition, they start to become increasingly more misleading to make the appearance that they're "closing the gap" with ARM much faster than they really are.

Before I start, I want to say that I use a Core i7 in my laptop, but I just hate shameless misleading of consumers, whether it's from Intel, Nvidia, AMD or Samsung.

There are 3 "misleading strategies" that Intel has used lately:

1) Turbo-boost, of course. Their new Atom chips are actually 1.3-1.5 Ghz, but they market them as 2-2.4 Ghz chips, a speed that also helps them do very well in CPU benchmarks (they're still about 2x behind any other ARM GPU, but I think they'll start using turbo speed for the Atom GPU's in the next generation, too, again to make it "seem" like they caught up - except not really).

2) Launching the most powerful version they have first, even if it's not going to be used in most of the devices the consumers want, but this way the press is all over it, and then the consumers remember that "brand" that was very powerful, even if it's not what they're getting in their device.

Example: Haswell's Iris Pro. It was the first to be sent to sites and benchmark, and it showed much bigger GPU performance than before in laptops. The only problem? It's probably never going to be in a laptop. It was meant for PC's mostly, and again as a "halo product", to make people think that "Haswell is very powerful". In fact most laptops have only seen about 20 percent increase in GPU performance with Haswell, compared to IVB.

Second example: They launched Bay Trail first, the "tablet version", to make people think "how powerful Atom is" and that it's "good for smartphones", and then they will release Merrified for smartphones, half a year later (which would already put them behind competition), and probably even weaker than Bay Trail performance wise. But most consumers will just remember that Bay Trail was great in benchmarks (see 1, also), even that's not what they're getting.

3) They're starting to push the "SDP" measuring, so tech websites can start writing about and promoting their chips as "5W chips" or whatever, and hope that even if they're now using the SDP name after the power consumption number, they will eventually forget to mention it ("Intel's 5W chips", etc).

SDP is nothing but an absolute shameless scam from Intel. They want to have their cake and eat it, too: a) declare super high performance with the burst speed that it's not practical at all for too long, and b) declare super low-power with SDP, even if the chips themselves can get a lot hotter than Intel is implying with SDP, especially if they start using the Turbo-Boost speed.

These guys explain it a lot better than I could:

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/25/intel-keeps-up-the-unethi...

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/9/3856050/intel-candid-explai...

If I can't use my laptop at the advertised clock speeds for more than 10-30 minutes continuously, then it's nothing but a scam, meant to fool consumers into thinking their chips are either a lot more powerful or a lot more efficient than they really are.