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Modern GPUs are in a very real sense the spiritual successors of the Connection Machine. So in some sense the "sort of analogue" has already arrived.

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At one point there some deeply discounted Intel Phi PCIe boards on the grey market which I presume were either taken out of scale build-out during an upgrade or perhaps part of an abandoned project.

For a while I considered getting a few for a simulation hobby project I had at the time but the stars never really came into alignment for that.

I looked into that myself, but the number of cores didn't compare to that of GPUs - the cost was right, though. I don't know if those boards were better than a GPU or what? Maybe they were more optimized for compute than what a GPU is? I was kinda looking at them for playing more with ML (I've gotten tensorflow with CUDA working well on my 750 ti GPU and it wasn't bad - but the cost for something better beyond a 900 series was crazy at the time).

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