thanks for all the replies. so far, the impression I get is: - Intel isn't interested in resellers, only a few OEMs. - even OEMs are not really on top of things. - there many claims of Phi being quite picky about PCIe and BIOS. - OEMS generally want to sell you a $5k server with that $3k Phi. - some OEMs offer surprisingly dense solutions (not necessarily a good thing...)
I find the PCIe/BIOS stuff quite dubious, though I suppose Phi is still elatively immature. maybe the next version will be the one that will be generally applicable. I suspect by contrast that I can buy a K20 card and drop it into most any gen1/2/3 PCIe x16 slot and it'll work (assuming I provide the right power and cooling, of course.) all this seems rather surprising to me. I know HPC isn't the center of the universe, but to me it looks like Intel is executing Phi poorly. NVidia has a huge headstart, and frankly, AMD's HSA stuff seems a lot more coherent and thought out (though obviously still vapor-phase.) _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
