I know it's not ideal, but there are some Xeon Phi coprocessors available for cheap. Has anyone tried running hundreds of copies of the client on one to keep its threads busy? How'd it do?

As far as i know a xeon phi is a cpu wich is only used when a special type of coding is used. In boinc world that means: other workunit type.... and thats not here:p

The xeon phi idea is actually the same as an gpu working on "cpu tasks". Although boinc as a whole doesnt support xeon phi...

Yes, I know... when you get down to it, it's basically a specialized Linux computer with a lot of slower cores with 4-way SMT on a daughter card. I thought perhaps I could get one cheap during some firesales when a new version was coming out and get a toolchain working to build Enigma and run it on that, controlled through BOINC manager on another device. Unfortunately, those cheap prices dried up and I moved on.