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Bottle necked on the CPU, yes, but probably only on a single (or a small number) of threads on the CPU. Xeon Phi will give you lots of slow threads. For the CPU you'd be better off getting a low-core-count processor with the best clock rate you can find/afford. The gamer-oriented i7 extremes are usually good.

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The main things to look for are a sufficient number of PCI express lanes, a high "turbo" clock speed, and sufficient memory capacity and bandwidth. The E5-2698 v4s used in the DGX-1 have 40 PCI express lanes, a 3.6 GHz turbo clock, and 76.8 GB/s memory bandwidth. So does the Core i7-6900K. (The Core i7-6900K has a max turbo clock of 4 GHz, but fewer cores, and smaller total DRAM capacity than the E5-2698v4 (128GB vs 1536GB).)

True - I am considering the 3.7 to 4GHz i7 processors as well because of higher clock speed.

Some things that are enticing towards the Phi, are 1) 16GB on chip MCDRAM - that is a lot of cache! 2) I can get a copy of Intel Parallel Studio XE compiler and compile Lua and Torch from source code, thus making them use more cores on Phi.

I have reached out to Intel AI developers and NVidia cuDNN team to ask their take on it. Let's see what they advise.

Did you ever anything back from the intel or nvidia guys?

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