I am running boinc on a ppc64 that was installed in Gentoo Linux. Cache is apparently either reported as -0 KB or not reported at all. Does this mean that boinc can't see the cache and won't use it, or will the cpu use it whether it's reported or not. I know that I have 4 MB of L2 cache.

Quote from a thread on the SETI forum:

The CPU Cache numbers reported by BOINC are usually wrong, ignore them. Trust what CPUz is telling you. I'm guessing that getting the CPU cache reporting correctly is not their highest priority as it doesn't really affect any operational things, it's info only. As it's allways wrong it should probably be turned off to avoid confusion. (no info is better than wrong info)

and further down:

For Windows, BOINC does not even attempt to measure cache size. Instead it uses 1000000 divided by the number of CPU cores. Then when it is reported the value is divided by 1024. All single CPU systems show as 976.56 KB, duals as 488.28, quads as 244.14...

Just like the BOINC benchmarks, the number doesn't have any effect on what a host can do. All those values were merely intended to help BOINC manage work, etc.

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)