For example one HN user told a story of a magazine who benchmarked different compilers including this user's. This user's compiler recognized the benchmark code was dead code and just eliminated it where other compilers didn't. This magazine called him out for cheating and it hurt sales for his compiler. He didn't mean to cheat the benchmark. It's just that the benchmark being used in an outdated methodology for evaluating performance.

>The only sensible rationale for such a decision is to improve a device’s power efficiency and battery life.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16794/oneplus-9-performance-e...

>John Poole, the lead developer of Geekbench, was able to reproduce the wild performance changes based on whether the S22 thought it was running a benchmark or a game. Poole changed Geekbench's package name to that of Genshin Impact, a popular game, and saw benchmark scores plummet. The Snapdragon Galaxy S22 dropped its single-core score 46 percent

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/samsung-caught-throt...

If Samsung had used this performance limiting feature during testing, and then released phones that didn't have it still citing the better battery numbers, then yes that would be cheating.

That's not what's happening here.

Is Intel cheating too because their processors can allocate tasks to more performant or efficient cores?

Is Intel cheating because they can exceed the TDP ratings when thermal and power constraints allow it?

When Volkswagen and other automakers applied different software to cars that were being emissions tested and ones that are driving on the road, that is cheating.

This is different imo.