Back in mid-2016 I was renting an IBM dual E5-2699v4 "bare metal" cloud server for US$500/month to mine HOdlcoin. It didn't go anywhere but one of the things I always wanted to try was to mine that coin on the Xeon Phi. Between myself and another miner it was our "Holy Grail" to own one of these things back then.
I'm happy to report that today I managed to compile that codebase on the Xeon Phi 7290 under Ubuntu 16.04.4 and with no optimization at all achieved 2,400H/s which is better than the server I used to rent, by a margin of about 33%. Damn, colour me impressed. The Xeon Phi - and massively parallel computing in general - has huge potential.
Setup specs: AES-NI and AVX2 enabled, 8GB of memory with 32 threads per GB.
The machine is still perfectly usable for web browsing with 256 threads running in the background.
