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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
From their website: "The Q.rad produces heat by computation, the electricity consumption is measured by an embedded counter and related expenses are automatically refunded to the host."
. . . refunded . . . ?!? Like, when . . . ?!?!? When "monkeys fly out of their asses" is probably the correct answer.
"Thank you for your participation in our ThinkFarter initiative!" You will receive a prototype of our device real soon now!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
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.
Reliability: they get a physically distributed compute network that is diverse across geography, utility, and ISP, with next to no telcom hotel costs. Possibly also some renewable/cogen energy credits of whatever form they take in the host country.
(As to the comment below, given what they are using them for, the bandwidth requirements are likely rather small... they transfer chunks of input data and then munch on them for a good long while.)
I wonder what they have for local storage. ISTR from my BOINC days that most applications wanted a hefty storage area so their job servers didn't have to be arsed to talk to the nodes more than once a day or so. Also best to do due diligence and ask them to verify no wifi adaptors in there... they probably aren't pricks surrepticiously trying to build an access network, but these days companies really need to be forced to promise that in writing/website just in case.
Most critical thing I learned from my BOINC days though: find out how much noise these things make. If they are purely radiant, kudos to this company.
Someone had to do it.