> ...but actually getting one has so far proved to be impossible.
Where/when did you try buying? I didn't think it was difficult to get the 1st-gen Phi cards while they were selling them --
especially as it seemed like nobody wanted them. Admittedly I never bought any myself, my employer picked up some 31S1P from a local server OEM for testing when they were massively discounted.
Note that the Knights Landing, the current generation is released socketed only for now, so you'd need to buy a server or the ninja dev platforms Intel sells through Colfax.
I tried two online vendors that were actively soliciting customers but when push came to shove they couldn't deliver. Right around the same time I ordered an FPGA dev kit and an NVIDIA board, solved the problem I was dealing with and moved on.
Still, I would have very much liked to play around with the 'phi'.
> Admittedly I never bought any myself, my employer picked up some 31S1P from a local server OEM for testing when they were massively discounted.
That's the kind of deal I was looking at too. Maybe they were massively discounted because they were already EOL'd?
> Still, I would have very much liked to play around with the 'phi'.
Well, if you're still interested, KNL is a significantly better architecture, so you could just try now.
> That's the kind of deal I was looking at too. Maybe they were massively discounted because they were already EOL'd?
Refreshed my memory and I was wrong; there was some discussion to jump on the $125-$195/card deal Colfax had late 2014 [1] (likely dumping stock due to EOL), but we figured that they are not even worth that much. In comparison, the one card we have was actually bought just 10-11 months before for ~$1500.
Where/when did you try buying? I didn't think it was difficult to get the 1st-gen Phi cards while they were selling them -- especially as it seemed like nobody wanted them. Admittedly I never bought any myself, my employer picked up some 31S1P from a local server OEM for testing when they were massively discounted.
Note that the Knights Landing, the current generation is released socketed only for now, so you'd need to buy a server or the ninja dev platforms Intel sells through Colfax.