Philip Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing, took to Twitter to publicise Samsung’s “shenanigans” in manipulating benchmark scores for its Galaxy Note 3 smartphone.

According to the Ars Technica report highlighted by the Apple exec, the new flagship from the South Korean company “scores really, really well in benchmark test – puzzlingly well, in fact”.

It said that after investigation, it found that Samsung appears to be artificially boosting speeds by using a “benchmarking mode” when popular testing apps are run.

This keeps the CPU locked into 2.3GHz mode with all cores active – otherwise, the processor can turn idle, shut cores and switch power modes depending on use.

Without the boost, the performance of the Qualcomm chip in the Note 3 drops closer to that of LG’s G2 – which is unsurprising, considering that it uses the same silicon.

It was also suggested the company is “doing something to the [graphics processor] as well, though these clock speeds are more difficult to access than the CPU speeds”.

Earlier this year, Ars Technica reported that Samsung had followed the same path with its Galaxy S4.

In this case, Samsung argued that it was lowering the speed for some apps in order to reduce heat and extend battery life, while others could run at a higher rate – with the list of apps in the latter category included benchmarking apps.