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Cyanogen Demonstrates Quadrant’s Flaws

Filed under News by Kenneth Pennington on August 16, 2010 at 8:52 PM

Quadrant has been a top-three benchmarking application of choice since the blow up of Google’s Android operating system.  Other than the Linpack and Neocore benchmarking applications, Quadrant’s one of the only options. Quadrant is a piece of Android software developed by Aurora Softworks.

Today, famed Android developer Cyanogen posted a troubling tweet about the flaws of Aurora Softworks’ Quadrant application. He specifically pointed to the I/O portion of the Quadrant benchmark test. The I/O test is an assessment of the efficiency of “filesystem access and database operations” on a device. In Cyanogen’s tweet, he says he was able to exploit the flaw to get obscenely high Quadrant benchmark scores by mounting “a tmpfs over quadrant’s data directory.” A tmpfs, or temporary file storage system, can artificially inflate a device’s I/O score and provide unreal benchmark improvements.

We’ve seen this kind of artificially high score improvement most notably on the Samsung Galaxy S. The Galaxy S has been berated for it’s use of the RFS filesystem employed by Samsung which has caused stuttering and lag on Galaxy S devices. But hacks that mounted an Ext2, Ext3, or Ext4 partition to store application data boosted real world performance a sizable amount, but Quadrant scores through the roof.

Until Aurora Softworks can work out the bugs with it’s I/O test, Quadrant may not be the best source of speed confirmations. Cyanogen advised Android users: “Don’t rely on this stuff as your guide to how fast your phone is. There are a lot of other factors.”

Check out these ridiculous Quadrant scores below. One from Cyanogen and the other from one of our very own BriefMobile writers.

Cyanogen Quadrant Benchmark
BriefMobile Captivate Benchmark

Source: Twitter

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