Xeon Phi coprocessor for cheap.

[Desslok]

I wonder if these could be used to fold if cooled properly.

http://slickdeals.net/f/7284428-xeon-phi-coprocessor-31s1p-for-195-or-less?v=1

Heck of alot of crunching power for the price. Granted you would have to get a Xeon board among other hardware.

 

[petrusbroder]

Well, I don't know, maybe this helps a bit?
OTOH: It is a bit slow ... just above 1 GHz. You probably would miss some deadlines ...
But DC other than folding? 200 seti@home WUs at at time?

 

[biodoc]

According to this F@H FAQ, Intel Phi is not supported but they are watching the technology as it matures.

https://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/faq-high-performance/#ntoc14

 

[ZipSpeed]

Would definitely be awesome for DC work if there were any support for it. Could you imagine running 4 of those cards?

 

[PCTC2]

If anyone is going to jump on this deal to play with the Phis, let it be known that some motherboards have issues supporting the Phis. We had quite a few servers in my old job that would detect the Phi and install the drivers, but wouldn't be able to communicate with the Phi properly.

I kind of want to buy 4 of these to code some cool parallel processing applications.

 

[Rakehellion]

OTOH: It is a bit slow ... just above 1 GHz. You probably would miss some deadlines ...

The GTX 980 just runs at 1.1 GHz.

 

[petrusbroder]

Yes, it does - but the GTX980 GPU is massively paralell and the app is optimized for the GPU.
The Xeon Phi is a CPU with 50 cores and each core has 4 threads. Since each core is running @ 1.1 GHz you should compare it to the Intel/AMD cores, which run at at least 2.2 GHz, and - when OC'ed - at 4.7 GHz.
As far as I know, there are no optimized apps for the Phi; not in Folding@Home nor in BOINC. For Folding@Home the CPU speed matters a lot.