If you wanted a Xeon Phi coprocessor for any reason: 31S1P 8GB for $150 at SabrePC

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pxc

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The list price is off. These cards are $1000 and up outside this special promotion. It comes with 57 cores and 1 TFLOPs DP performance. Pretty hot deal if you need or want one.
 
Its $150 at multiple places, colfax, advanced clustering, etc:
Have you always wanted to try the Xeon Phi™? Now’s the time to experience the advantages of Intel® Xeon Phi™ with deep discounts being offered by Advanced Clustering for the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor 31S1P.

Right now you can save 90% off the regular price for an Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor 31S1P with our promotional price of just $150 per card.
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And its just $125 for quantities of 10 and above, so I don't think you could buy these and resell them.

Its some kind of special promotion: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/special-promotion-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessor-31s1p

If you don't personally have a use for them, I'd skip it, as I don't think you'll have any luck flipping.

Edit: Even Amazon has em for $142: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-BC31S1P-Xeon-31S1P-Coprocessor/dp/B00OMCB4JI
 
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I saw the earlier promotions for $999. I didn't realize other places had it for around the same price during the promotion.

Regardless of where or why someone buys it (as a toy or for particular work), it's a good deal.
 
Very good idea for Intel to do this. Now I will definitely buy one or two of these and see how the stack up against my Titans and CUDA. For this cheap it'll worth to look into and try out just so I can put it on my resume.

Does anyone know what the difference between the "SC" and "BC" models are.
 
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SixFootDuo said:
What is this for exactly?

CAD / 3D work?
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Anything really. If you can develop something that can take advantage of highly parallel programming, you should consider one of these. The main advantage is hugely parallel (and very little overhead unlike CPU) and no load on the rest of system. You can be computing with a tflop of performance on this and use the rest of the system normally. The main disadvantage is you're limited to the onboard RAM (slow down massively if you try to use the system RAM). Lots of engineering type applications may require way more than 8GB of RAM. But if you can execute and fit everything you need within the onboard memory, these types of cards are the way to go. The peak DP performance of this card is over 1tflops (where as the latest and greatest 5960x can hit over 300glfops if its consuming some 400W+ of power), and that's just per PCIe slot. If you're a great programmer you might figure out how to run the cards themselves in parallel (extremely difficult to do - I haven't figured out how to do that efficiently on my Titans yet)

Not a lot of things take advantage of "GPU compute" yet, and because these are so new, I doubt almost anything uses Xeon Phi, so it really is a developer mainly thing right now. And because CUDA and even OpenCL have such huge head starts on Intel, this is a great move by Intel to gain entry into this market.

Here's a pretty good article on Phi : http://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2013/10/03/Top-5-Xeon-Phi-Misconceptions-508/
 
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Ok I found some info for a few apps that have early beta support for this for encoding Bluray movies.
 
I have no immediate use for this, but I still feel an overwhelming need to buy one...
 
Looks like a fire sale on these cards to clear them out, possibly due to Knights Landing arriving in the next few months? From Colfax's listing: "Program volume limited to Intel’s supply of 31S1P"

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8217/intels-knights-landing-coprocessor-detailed

But yeah if you ever wanted to own a piece of Larrabee, this would be it, although I would say if you don't have a specific use for one of these you're probably better off just putting $150 into Intel stock and watching it turn into double that in a few years.

Lastly, from the Colfax listing, bear in mind these things are passively cooled, which sounds pretty impressive for a 270W part. But then you see this in bold:

http://www.colfax-intl.com/nd/xeonphi/31s1p-promo.aspx#sthash.9Y0Eqxzj.dpuf

NOTE: Passive cooling solution for servers (not for use in workstations)

Probably not a good idea to put one of these in your rig unless you zip tie some 40mm 1U fans on the end of the card. Anyone who has worked with server racks knows they have those insane little 40mm delta fans, which this card probably relies on to push enough air through it to keep it cool.
 
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