The pinnacle of AI hardware is flexible, high-performance chips for training machine learning. Until now, there haven’t been many big players in the game, with the biggest of the bunch being Nvidia, Intel, Google and Qualcomm. Now however, it looks like Huawei is looking throw their hat in the ring with their new Ascend 910 chip and Mindspore AI framework.
Huawei’s Ascend 910 high-end AI chip is built for servers, bidding to grow its share of the booming cloud services market. Companies using AI applications require huge amounts of data to train smart algorithms, which can take several days or weeks. The Ascend 910 delivers 256 TeraFLOPS for half-precision floating point (FP16) operations and 512 TeraOPS for integer precision calculations (INT8), while having a max power consumption of 310W.
Huawei claims that its chip can process more data in a faster amount of time than its competitors and help train networks in a matter of minutes. In fact, according to Huawei’s rotating chairman Eric Xu, “Ascend 910 performs much better than we expected. It has more computing power than any other AI processor in the world.”
On top of that, Huawei also launched MindSpore in Shenzhen on Friday, an AI computing framework that supports the development of AI applications. MindSpore has 20 percent fewer lines of core code than leading frameworks on the market in a typical neural network for natural language processing (NLP).
Mindspore is designed to work in tandem with Ascend 910, making it two times faster at training AI models than other mainstream training cards using TensorFlow. The Chinese company aims to offer a portfolio of AI products to meet the different needs of businesses and consumers. Huawei’s Xu said MindSpore will go open source in the first quarter of 2020 as part of the company strategy to drive broader AI adoption and help developers.
“Huawei’s AI strategy is to invest in basic research and talent development, build a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio, and foster an open global ecosystem,” Xu said, when talking about the company’s AI strategy in October 2018. The company has been striving to build a complete ecosystem, which no company in the world could do independently until now.
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