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French Company Plans To Heat Homes, Offices With AMD Ryzen Pro Processors
At its Ryzen Pro event in New York City last month, AMD invited a French company called Qarnot to discuss how they're using Ryzen Pro processors to heat homes and offices for free. The company uses the Q.rad -- a heater that embeds three CPUs as a heat source -- to accomplish this feat. "We reuse the heat they generate to heat homes and offices for free," the company says in a blog post. "Q.rad is connected to the internet and receives in real time workloads from our in-house computing platform."
The idea is that anyone in the world can send heavy workloads over the cloud to a Q.rad and have it render the task and heat a person's home in the process. The two industries that are targeted by Qarnot include movies studios for 3D rendering and VFX, and banks for risk analysis. Qarnot is opting in for Ryzen Pro processors over Intel i7 processors due to the performance gain and heat output. According to Qarnot, they "saw a performance gain of 30-45% compared to the Intel i7." They also report that the Ryzen Pro is "producing the same heat as the equivalent Intel CPUs" they were using -- all while providing twice as many cores.
While it's neat to see a company convert what would otherwise be wasted heat into a useful asset that heats a person's home, it does raise some questions about the security and profitability of their business model. By using Ryzen Pro's processors, OS independent memory encryption is enabled to provide additional security layers to Qarnot's heaters. However, Q.rads are naturally still going to be physically unsecured as they can be in anyone's house.
Further reading: The Mac Observer, TechRepublic
The idea is that anyone in the world can send heavy workloads over the cloud to a Q.rad and have it render the task and heat a person's home in the process. The two industries that are targeted by Qarnot include movies studios for 3D rendering and VFX, and banks for risk analysis. Qarnot is opting in for Ryzen Pro processors over Intel i7 processors due to the performance gain and heat output. According to Qarnot, they "saw a performance gain of 30-45% compared to the Intel i7." They also report that the Ryzen Pro is "producing the same heat as the equivalent Intel CPUs" they were using -- all while providing twice as many cores.
While it's neat to see a company convert what would otherwise be wasted heat into a useful asset that heats a person's home, it does raise some questions about the security and profitability of their business model. By using Ryzen Pro's processors, OS independent memory encryption is enabled to provide additional security layers to Qarnot's heaters. However, Q.rads are naturally still going to be physically unsecured as they can be in anyone's house.
Further reading: The Mac Observer, TechRepublic
It will be interesting to see what measures are taken to limit risk of tampering with the devices to gain access to the platform and/or to simply peg cpu utilization for more heat output.
Who is paying?
Sig?
How much heat do the current processors produce compared to a coal power plant when build as compactly as electrically possible? In the future as those coal power plants go quiet, new sources of heat might be useful for pumping heat to those city wide district heating systems. No physical access in the customer premises required.
One thing AMD processors do well is generate a lot of heat.
I know the French take a vacation in August, but it seems like you wouldn't want a space heater running during any of the summer. Even if you have air conditioning, you'd have to pay more to pump the generated great out of your home.
There's a lot of work that requires big data crunching abilities of entirely public data sets for non-secret purposes. A master's thesis based on publicly available data (if it's ever that affordable). Professional researchers and professors without easy access to HPC but working on data or results that are not confidential. Maybe they have the budget for this. I think there's a lot of potential here.
According to Qarnot, they "saw a performance gain of 30-45% compared to the Intel i7." They also report that the Ryzen Pro is "producing the same heat as the equivalent Intel CPUs" they were using -- all while providing twice as many cores.
So use twice as many Intel processors and you'll heat the houses faster.
Why not write a background application that I can run/throttle and just pay me for work done? I would leave my computer on at night in the winter. Beside that this is a good idea. Paying for entropy (heat) always seemed like a wasted opportunity.
When you can use $600 of silicon to do the job?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Whenever i get cold, i just fire up my dual Xeon workstation and let it run a bit of number crunching for LHC@home
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Because this business model is not well though-of. Internet informs me that AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X consumes 95 W of power, much like an old-school light-bulb. Crappy oil radiators seem to start at 600 W (about 6 CPUs) and better ones have a power consumption of up to 2500 W (26 CPUs). Having used such radiators myself, I would definitely go with the bigger one. Other points of interest are the surface area, the surface temperature and the heat transfer mechanism that are different between a 2500 W oil radiator and a 26 CPU rack. Even if the CPUs reach a rather elevated temperature (1700X maxes out at 95 C), the surface temperature of the rack is only going to be luke warm, so you're not going to get any heat radiated to you. The heat is going to reach you by convection via the fans, which is a crappy way to warm yourself up. Then you would need a full rack at least in every other room to heat up a whole home, which will take up a lot of space.
If you're going to run a data center, the only thing this will save is the real-estate space. The costs of installation, transportation etc, however, are going to eat away most of the savings in my opinion. I suppose, of course, that Qarnot will be paying for the electricity. If not, then they are just looking for chumps that would be better off switching back to incadescent light bulbs.
I know electricity is cheap in France because of nuclear power and all. But this is still a terrible idea. Resistive heating (which is what this is) is terribly inefficient compared with a heat pump like an air conditioner (which can in fact heat besides cool down buildings when run in reverse). It can use like 2-3x as much power to heat a building by the same amount.
" it does raise some questions about the security... Q.rads are naturally still going to be physically unsecured as they can be in anyone's house."
When you have to reach for physical security to try and identify a flaw, it tends to dismiss the concern altogether. A lot of hardware is vulnerable if you can get your hands on it.
You must be new here, GNAA have definitely been around longer than a decade.
where are the ryzen boards with ipmi and (at least the other boards can do ecc)? Intel E3 cpus suck and the e5 line is costly to get more then 4 cores.
Also can't find 1P epyc systems anywhere yet. Where is the workstation / small server level amd server stuff??? even amd threadripper sever (less cores then epyc but higher clocks will be nice) and it makes better use of the min 16 cores for windows server core packs.
if the company would use the CPU's in this heaters for mining bitcoins o-)
Those French! This would have been better for a 1 April press release.
By the way, the energy doesn't come from the computation. It comes from your wall socket.
This was all understood (by the French) 200 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Fiat Lux.
I remember when i had an amd that heated my room back in the early 2000s. I thought that's what they were for
Which came first, the business model for this company or the obligatory xkcd? I don't even know any more.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
I used to be the sysop [ system operator ] of a BBS [ bulletin system ] back in the day [ mid eighties to early nineties ]. I met a sysop who ran a multi-line PCBoard system from the basement of his house in a Ohio. PCBoard required one CPU for two phone lines. I don't remember how many lines he had but it was an impressive number. He told me that he had enough desktop PCs in his basement to heat his house in the winter. He also had enough paid subscribers to pay for the cost of cooling his basement in the summer.
That must be why everyone complains about Intel's current i7 and i9 chips melting and overheating while no one complains about that with Ryzens who can do more work while running their cores at 60% load compared to Intel at 99% load.
Every home has one, they run year-round, and resistive heating is what they do already. Why not?
BBC news article from 2015
Nerdalize
This was reported on French mainstream radio back in March and April, and in the Figaro newspaper back in 2015.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2015/10/13/20005-20151013ARTFIG00016-qarnot-computing-des-radiateurs-tres-calculateurs.php
The only "news" in this report is the use of Ryzen CPUs.
Are much better for this.
I've been doing this with my gaming rig for about two years since my last major upgrade. When I'm not playing video games, I'm a Gentoo user. Between the two, my room stays warmer than the rest of the house through winter.
If it's really cold outside, I'll fire up folding@home!
An expensive way to keep your baguette warm.
As a single value point on this idea, I can attest to using my PC/Server as a local heat source.
- Living in Maine, poorly insulated house, not wanting to burn too much heating oil at night, but still some...
I'd wake up my system once I got home from work, task it for something.. update builds (running Gentoo...), play a game or 2, watch movies... As long as it was on, I could reliably see a 4-5F bump in room temperature.
As a testament to confirmation, when I got a closed loop liquid cooler for the CPU, that all changed. No more varied temp increase I saw before with heatsink and a fan.
Never did the math, per Watt cost compared to heating oil, but I have a hard time thinking it's anything other than negligible for the comfort it provided.
I've been heating my house with AMD processors for years now.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
The current practice of directly moving lowest entropy, precious energy to the highest entropy state - heat - will be considered immoral and eventually illegal. You won't be able to buy an electrical air or water heating system without that including compute units. Why heat with a dumb resistor when you can do it equally well with a CPU/GPU which does valuable computation, for which someone else would otherwise use up an equal amount of energy.
The fake global warming initiative that Tony Blair, Humanity's worst living war monger, promotes with all his might, is essentially a giant corruption machine.
In the UK, for instance, dishonest people make millions installing solar panels on the roofs of UK homes- all paid for by tax breaks from the UK tax payers. Seaside councils have fake tiny windmills and solar panels pretending to power their strings of coloured nighttime lights.
Can you warm a house with your lightbulbs? No? Well that's how effective using Ryzen CPU systems will be. BUT it plain doesn't matter. The company makes its dishonest proposal to the government. The government NEEDS a ton of green initiatives on its books to meet its international obligations- so it agrees to the tax breaks. And slashdot, one of the primary FAKE NEWS tech outlets on the net, promotes the story.
In another decade or so the sheeple will be told that all the 'alternative' energy efforts were a giant criminal con- but now, of course, the government is much more honests so you can believe its new initiatives. Same old, same old.
In the West that's what the governments are all about- free tax payer money to the right types of criminals. After all the mass murdering horror, Hillary Clinton, ran the most expensive election campaign in Human History- and who paid for it? You! You work, and they steal and then tell you to be pleased at how they steal.
Your response to this story about French con people should be to want to 'run them out of town on a rail'. But that won't happen since today you are far too programmed by the fake news of the West's mainstream media.
Are the new processors really that inefficient? Way to go AMD!
Blazing Saddles reference -- whoosh.
While I don't know if this particular application is the best, I think co-generation is going to be one of those things that is going to be much more widespread in the near future. We tend to waste A LOT of energy, for example electric plants generate heat via various methods (coal, natural gas, nuclear) for production of electricity and then dump that heat into the atmosphere/ocean. Instead, at least where possible, that heat should be utilized (home heating, water heating, manufacturing, etc). This isn't going to work for all applications of course (some energy/manufacturing SHOULD be located far from populations) but others can be dropped right down into a city center with little issue and their "waste" heat can be used by the surrounding community while the business receives a convenient heat sink for their operations.
The alternative business model is paying for cooling. All computing energy used is converted to heat and typically removed from datacenters by expensive chiller units.
This model isn't about efficiently heating residences. You've pointed out all the fallacies with that idea. This model is about disposing of the heat in an environmentally friendly way that reduces heating costs in residences and simultaneously reduces energy costs for the business.
This scales elegantly too. The cost and lead-time of a new datacenter is extravagant, leading to a situation where some of the time you're over-provisioned, the rest under-provisioned and waiting for a new datacenter to come on-line. Over-provisioning costs investment dollars that sit there doing nothing. Under-provisioning costs business opportunity dollars that are lost whilst you cannot provide. The usual goal is to provision such that the sum of these two costs is minimised. This business model allows for much more granular just-in-time provisioning thus reducing both costs.
a coal power plant when build as compactly as electrically possible?
This is France they don't count on coal for their main power plant source.
They mostly count on nuclear.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
..., using one's own power to heat one's home while performing heavy computing tasks for 3rd parties... Am I the only one seeing a pattern here?
because they are BitCoin mining?
I never considered that Nick Farell portrayed himself as a great writer given all his incessant pseudo-caustical humor that usually drowned any information in his articles, but this is quite lousy, as he cannot even seem to copy'n paste properly links from the original Slashdot post:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/processors/44508-ryzen-pro-heats-french-homes-and-offices
> AMD has invited a French company called Qarnot to discuss how they're using Ryzen Pro processors to heat homes and offices for free.
> The company uses the Q.rad -- a heater that embeds three CPUs as a heat source -- to accomplish this feat. "We reuse the heat they generate to heat homes and offices for free," the company says in a blog post. "Q.rad is connected to the internet and receives in real time workloads from our in-house computing platform."
> The idea is that anyone in the world can send heavy workloads over the cloud to a Q.rad and have it render the task and heat a person's home in the process.
> The two industries that are targeted by Qarnot include movies studios for 3D rendering and VFX, and banks for risk analysis. Qarnot is opting in for Ryzen Pro processors over Intel i7 processors due to the performance gain and heat output.
>
> According to Qarnot, they "saw a performance gain of 30-45% compared to the Intel i7." They also report that the Ryzen Pro is "producing the same heat as the equivalent Intel CPUs" they were using -- all while providing twice as many cores.
>
> By using Ryzen Pro's processors, OS independent memory encryption is enabled to provide additional security layers to Qarnot's heaters. However, Q.rads are naturally still going to be physically unsecured as they can be in anyone's house.
>
> No one seems to mind that processors chucking out a lot of heat in the summer might be a bad thing, even in France.
One part of the first sentence removed, and an extra sentence added at the end.
Well, I guess there is a non-nil probability to produce the very exact same words other a dozen sentences...
mlw.
They're targeting rendering work and other very parallel workloads. I am surprised they are doing modules with 2-4 GPUs as well since a lot of that work has moved that direction (especially 3D rendering). Plus, if they have a workload deficit, just just load up some cryptocurrency mining.
Living in Texas, I have a friend who is in the process of selling his mining rig, not because it wasn't profitable, but because with just 6 GPUs in a 1500 square feet apartment, the AC kept failing to keep up.
yea but it definitely surged since the last elections in the states ... its like they let loose a few cargoloads of inbreed somewhere ... nonetheless free speech is absolute and moderation is for assholes, i believe in self-regulating communities and despite the top layers being hogged by irrelevance this site is still ichiban to me. And i think its funny they finally found a use for amd cpus LOL
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I rounded.