I recently added a Moto G (2025) phone, and it's specs (confirmed by CPU-Z) says it uses two types of CPUs, 2 Cortex-A76 and 6 Cortex-A55. The A76s are listed as the "high power" cores, with the A-55s as the "energy efficiency" ones.

From what I've gathered-and somewhat confirmed by experience- BOINC is usually limited to using the "energy" cores. In most systems that I've used, this means that I would be able to use at most 4 cores out of 8, and trying to simultaneously run more tasks means that they're being swapped in and out of the 4 'useable' cores, with the net effect of just running up the task's clock time for no effect to the CPU (crunching) time, as seen on devices where all of the cores have been the same type (and, presumably, set to 4 "high" cores and 4 "energy" cores).

I haven't attempted this yet, but... If I wanted to try to simultaneously run 6 tasks, given that the Moto seems to have 6 "energy" cores that could be accessed by BOINC, would this work, or would the two extra tasks still be swapped in the other four cores, as expected from previous experience?

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

You can run 6 tasks as that's the amount of usable cores BOINC can appoint.

I have a similar model, Moto G6 Power 5G 2023. If I use more than 3 of the 8 "available cores" it goes thermal, phone & battery overheats especially running Einstein tasks.

In reply to Dr Who Fan's message of 31 Jul 2025:

[I]t goes thermal, phone & battery overheats especially running Einstein tasks.

I used to have a phone that did that, but that was several years ago.

Any more, if it happens, it's because it's summer, running 4 cores, and the phone is in my pocket as I'm walking around.

I do have a Moto G Power (2022), but since it stays at home it tends to stay in air conditioning, and so far hasn't really gotten warm.

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

In reply to Jord's message of 31 Jul 2025:

You can run 6 tasks as that's the amount of usable cores BOINC can appoint.

That's what I suspected, but I wasn't sure- especially since this is my first mixed-core Android.

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Incidental trivia: When using CPU-Z, I can tell which core IDs are the A-76 CPUs, since the specs online list two different processor speeds, and the 76s are the ones running at the higher speed. IDs 0-5 are the 55s running at 2.0 GHz, and 6&7 are the 76s running at 2.4 GHz.

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

Host 341059 on wuprop:

Product name	motorola moto g - 2025 - SDK: 35 ABI: arm64-v8a
Local Standard Time	UTC -5 hours
Created	20 Jul 2025, 0:32:55 UTC
Total credit	442
Average credit	25.73
CPU type	ARM
[Impl 0x41 Arch 8 Variant 0x2 Part 0xd05 Rev 0]
Number of processors	8
Coprocessors	---
Virtualization	None
Operating System	Android
5.15.167-android13-8-00008-g31975b884c4b-ab13216403 (Android 15)
BOINC version	8.2.5
Memory	3.56 GB
Swap space	3.56 GB
Total disk space	109.58 GB
Free Disk Space	93.01 GB

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

I decided to try it, and so far haven't seen any wall-clock time penalties for Einstein tasks over the past day, so it seems that 6 cores are useable without any task swapping.

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/