I have power savings off since more than a week too.

I have got same problem at both of my devices: jiayu g3 and ainol novo 9 spark.
From what i have observed, when android device has screen turned off, cpu goes into some kind of power saving mode, and most of the time they do not crunch. Thats why there is difference between cpu time/elapsed time.

That is independent from:
- cpu governor(im running performance, and setcpu shows me 100% time at top frequency)
- deep sleep(deep sleep info shows me 0% time)

But when my devices have screen turned on, they run beatufuly, and i cant handle the heat :)

Thats the only solution i've found for now.

As next info. On astroids at home there is the same issue. Single core 40k vs 164k on 4 cores.

Here's my WAG:) I'd think that the easiest way to put BOINC on Android would be to wrap the C++ client in a Java wrapper and communicate through JNI. The problem might be that the client is run through the VM which (kind of) controls processor and memory usage. All tasks that run in the boinc space might need to share whatever resources Java has allocated to that instance of the boinc client.. which would explain why ChrisR1964 returns more result with one core instead of four and would suggest that the per-task cpu usage number doesn't accurately reflect actual usage since "real" usage would roughly be the sum of all tasks:)

That's it, krab84!

Android can run quad-cores and ARM cpus are perfectly capable quad-cores but the mobile device makers cripple their devices with a special rom. Probably they are worried about heat and power usage. So the mobile device can run 1 core but additional cores are only intended for handling interrupts or small background processes that might slow down the user while he tries to interact with the device. Different roms probably handle this slightly different ways, but the end result is that most mobile devices should only run BOINC on 1 core.

I feel less frustrated now that I can point to a specific cause - the rom.

Lawrence