Huawei Unveils New AI Chip Rivaling Nvidia's Performance Despite US Restrictions
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Huawei's new AI chip, the Ascend 910B, is considered by some to be on par with Nvidia's A100 data center GPUs in computing power. It's made by SMIC and powers products like Baidu's servers and iFlytek's language model.
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The chip allows Huawei to continue developing AI capabilities despite US sanctions restricting its chip development. Huawei has partnered with domestic suppliers to bolster its chip business.
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The Ascend 910B emerged around the same time as Huawei's Mate 60 Pro smartphone last August. The phone uses the Kirin 9000s processor made by SMIC.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently described Huawei as a "really, really good company" but said it's limited by the chip technology available to it in China.
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Huawei's software capabilities may not match Nvidia's CUDA platform yet. But its Ascend hardware and Compute Architecture for Neural Networks connect chips and software for AI computing.