That may be (though I think that was more the older models), but I think there's currently basically nothing else on the market that hits the sweet spot it was

That may be (though I think that was more the older models), but I think there's currently basically nothing else on the market that hits the sweet spot it was aiming for. If you want similar or better performance with that much bandwidth and concurrency you are looking at GPUs priced an order of magnitude higher. And if I had been working with them I would certainly have written custom stuff just for the Phi anyway--there's not much point in working with a machine like that if you just want to run the same old stuff, and taking advantage of the resources properly would be difficult without architecting around its design anyway. So while I'd be happy to hypothetically look into some other hardware that was priced and performed similarly to KNL, but had better tooling, I don't think such a thing actually exists.