nvidia China can't ship its advanced GPUs due to strict US export restrictions, so Huawei has done its best to make up for the shortfall.
At the recent Nanjing World Semiconductor Conference, Wang Tao, chief operating officer of Huawei's Ascend and Kunpeng ecosystem, claimed that Huawei's AI chip is on par, if not better, than Nvidia's A100.
According to South China Morning Post (SCMP)Wang said Huawei's Ascend 910B AI chip offers 80 percent efficiency of the Nvidia A100 when training AI machines, but “in some other tests, the Ascend chips can beat the A100 by up to 20 percent.” Huawei first introduced the Ascend chip series in 2019, after the firm was added to the US trade blacklist.
design changes
Although Nvidia sells low-end chips in China, it still claims to have a 90% share of the AI processor market in 2023. In comparison, Huawei had just 6% of the market, but the share can and will likely improve.
Although Wang stressed that there is “not much difference” between the Huawei 910B and the Nvidia A100 in training large AI models, a data snapshot shows that it is a very good AI model. CSET (Center for Security and Emerging Technology) report shows how US export controls are hampering Huawei's production.
“This analysis of Huawei's first-generation Ascend 910 series (2019) and second-generation Ascend 910B series (2022) shows that despite facing export controls, Huawei was able to design a high-performance chip that can be manufactured domestically at SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation),” the report said.
Despite this promising start, CSET He further added, “Our analysis shows that the performance increase is lower than advertised; only 75 percent of the theoretical maximum performance increase can be attributed to the actual increase in hardware performance. Additionally, Huawei reduced the number of active AI cores between the 910 and 910B series – possibly due to poor yields or limited capacity on SMIC's 7nm manufacturing process.”
To compensate for the fewer active AI cores, Huawei added an extra vector unit to each core and increased the clock speed to boost performance by 25%, resulting in a 50% increase. As for the other 25% improvement, it seems to be the result of “a change in the way Huawei calculates peak performance.”
you can read CSET' Read the full findings here.
