HTC One (M8) benchmark scores raise cheating suspicions

A couple of days ago, we reported that the Asian version of the HTC One (M8) with a 2.5GHz MSM8974AC Snapdragon 801 processor crushed the competition in the AnTuTu 4 benchmark. However, the triumph of the One (M8) may be short-lived, as it may turn out that the phone is cheating.

The reason for the eyebrow raising is AnTuTu X – an alternative version to AnTuTu 4 specially designed to prevent devices from cheating. When ePrice, which originally reported the beastly benchmark results of the One (M8), decided to run AnTuTu X on the phone, the results where quite different.
In fact, they’ve run the Samsung Galaxy S5, LG G Pro 2 and Sony Xperia Z2 alongside the HTC One (M8) on both AnTuTu 4 and AnTuTu X to see the differences. Save for the HTC One (M8) all of them scored similar results in the two benchmark apps, but the One (M8) showed an alarming difference of over 10,000 points.
Here are the scores in the ePrice testing.

AnTuTu 4

Higher is better

• Sort by Label
• Sort by Value

• HTC One (M8) – Asia 38815
• Sony Xperia Z2 32768
• LG G Pro 2 30068
• Samsung Galaxy S5 34898

AnTuTu X

Higher is better

• Sort by Label
• Sort by Value

• HTC One (M8) – Asia 27171
• Sony Xperia Z2 32508
• LG G Pro 2 29787
• Samsung Galaxy S5 35357

Naturally, difference of the two scores by the HTC One (M8) isn’t necessarily a result of cheating. The AnTuTu X benchmark could be scoring the phone’s hardware (read memory and RAM, in addition to the CPU) differently.
When we get a hold of the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2, we’ll run the benchmarks ourselves to confirm if this sort of behavior is indeed the case.