Ascend 920 AI chip: Huawei’s new approach to withstand U.S. ban and Nvidia supremacy
Huawei is taking a new step to hold the line against U.S. sanctions and the supremacy of Nvidia in the Chinese AI market, named – Ascend 920 chip. The company aims to increase its share in the AI segment amid growing chipset controls.
Ascend 920 is Huawei’s new approach against Nvidia’s grip in the Chinese AI chip market. The company took this step amid the chaos of blocking the supply of Nvidia H20 in China.
Before we learn about Ascend 920, let’s take a flashback!
The story began a couple of weeks ago when the US announced new chip controls. Under these restrictions, Nvidia requires a license to sell its H20 AI processors in China. The license is expected to cost around $5.5 million to the company.
As a result, Nvidia decided to halt the H20 AI processor in China. But looks like the decision is more of a tension than a benefit for the US chipmaker. After the pause on chip supply, the company started losing shares in its second-largest market.
Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, said that the US chip controls are handing the entire Chinese AI chip market to Huawei. The Ascend maker is already progressing in AI every year. Meanwhile, the new rules are further making it more innovative.
Since the Nvidia H20 may not be a part of the Chinese AI market, Huawei has introduced the Ascend 920 chip to fill the void created by the US-made product.
Ascend 920 AI chip: Huawei’s new approach to withstand U.S. ban and Nvidia supremacy (Image Credits: Weibo)
Ascend 920
Huawei has now unveiled the successor to the 910C AI processors – the Ascend 920. It is said to be built over a 6nm process technology by SMIC and has an improved design, slightly similar to its predecessor (910C).
The new chip has 900 TFLOPS, stands for Tera Floating-point Operations Per Second. It shows how many trillion floating-point calculations the GPU can perform each second. A higher TFLOPS value means a GPU can operate more complex tasks and data processing efficiently.
920 also features 4000GB/s memory bandwidth. The chip will likely offer 30-40% faster performance than previous-gen AI processors. Simply put, it can perform better than the Nvidia H20 processor.
It is unclear how the new chipset will perform in real-life situations. But we may soon find out, as the company is planning to officially debut the new chipset in the second half of this year.
Ahead of that, Huawei is ready to mass produce the Ascend 910C AI chip next month. The move can seemingly fulfill the Chinese companies like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent’s demand for AI chips.
How far these changes will work in favor of Huawei would be worth looking at.
The post Ascend 920 AI chip: Huawei’s new approach to withstand U.S. ban and Nvidia supremacy appeared first on Huawei Central.
