Yep and right now there is a promotion for the Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P. This is a PCIe board with 8Gig of RAM and passive cooling. So it demands a motherboard wh

Yep and right now there is a promotion for the Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P. This is a PCIe board with 8Gig of RAM and passive cooling. So it demands a motherboard which supports it and some sort of add-on cooling solution. I've had a very long term personal pet project of social simulation. Multi-Agent sims are really well suited for systems with very many independent cores (threads); that's why I was interested in the Epiphany. Seeing the Phi selling for something like $200 is really, really tempting. However, I hesitate because not only is the most of development that's gone on for the Phi so far really different than what I've been doing, the next version of the Xeon Phi will be self hosting (so it will be in a regular processor socket in a regular server motherboard). So I expect the prevalent software architecture to change again and the PCIe based versions will become a sort of evolutionary dead end. Still... I have a Haswell based development box which would support the Phi so it's really tempting! My secret hope is they begin to surface on eBay from folks who impulsively buy them only to discover they don't have a system which actually supports it and whatever they thought they were going to do isn't worth buying additional hardware.