4 ms·
The scenario you describe is malicious because people don't expect a charger to have "features" which consume large amounts of power without benefit, but it doe
by shabble 11y ago
The scenario you describe is malicious because people don't expect a charger to have "features" which consume large amounts of power without benefit, but it does make me wonder if such tech could be incorporated into electrical items whose express intent is to turn electricity into heat.
Say, a clothes iron, or washing machine/dishwasher water heater (where not already plumbed for hot water), etc.
Since computation ultimately dumps essentially 100% of the consumed energy as heat, why not use it for that?
Obvious arguments against are the cost of the initial hardware, and the engineering difficulty of making something which can actually operate whilst generating kilowatts of heat (i.e. not cooking your cores in the process)
- yzzxy 11y agoWired Magazine did a stunt where they ran an early ASIC miner as a coffee warming coaster in their office and displayed it on a webcam.
- ISL 11y agoThe idea has been around for a long while. Google "data furnace". The crux seems to be Moore's Law. We buy heaters and use them for decades, but any compute device has a useful lifetime of a few years before it's surpassed. If we ever see Moore's Law come to an end, expect to see a lot of highly-distributed computing.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoUnder these conditions, it could still work in irons or especially electric kettles. Those are so crappy nowadays, you have to buy new every two-three years anyway.
- ISL 11y agoUnless the device is on almost all the time, it won't compete with datacenters, even on price. Using compute for heat is a dodgy proposition even where heat is needed at least half the year. The minimal uptime of an iron or kettle really puts the kibosh on the economics.