Huawei might be stepping in to fill the void left by Nvidia in the Chinese market. Following the export ban from the US, Huawei officially announced the Ascend 920, which is its fastest AI chipset. The timing of the announcement is oddly coincidental and could be arriving at a big cost to Nvidia. So here’s what we know.
How the Huawei Ascend 920 AI Chip is Changing the Game
For those unaware, the United States announced stricter restrictions on the import of AI chips, which affects chipmaking giant, Nvidia. The company managed to circumvent previous regulations to sell its Nvidia H20 processors in the Chinese market. However, the latest export ban could be cracking down on this. But with AI growing exponentially in the region, Huawei’s new announcement arrives at the perfect time to fill in the gap.
As per the official announcement, the new Ascend 920 will hit mass production later this year and is based on SMIC’s 6nm process. It promises to offer up to 900 TFLOPS of BF16 compute and 4000GB/s of memory bandwidth. This chip is supported by HBM3 memory modules and will also support PCI 5.0, along with next gen interconnect protocols to help large model training. With this chip, the company could replace the Nvidia H20 by being an effective alternative.
To recall, the H20 is being used by other Chinese tech giants like Tencent and ByteDance. But after these new US restrictions, the Ascend 920 might be the next in line. The current gen Ascend 910C offers around 60 percent of the Nvidia H100’s performance, while the Ascend 920 possibly offering training efficiency by 30 to 40 percent.
For more daily updates, please visit our News Section.
Don’t miss a thing! Join our Telegram community for instant updates and grab our free daily newsletter for the best tech stories!
Comments