Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.’s closely guarded U.S.-licensed semiconductor capabilities will be renewed after Nvidia identifies the Chinese telecoms equipment giant for the first time as a potential rival for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. It is subject to extensive surveillance.
Nvidia is currently unable to ship its advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) to mainland China due to U.S. government export restrictions, so Huawei’s new AI chipsets have emerged as an alternative to the U.S. company’s Chinese products, industry sources said. experts and analysts say.
The Huawei Ascend 910B is already available through distributor channels on the mainland, and some industry insiders believe it to be on par with Nvidia’s popular A100 data center GPU in terms of computing power. Huawei has not issued any public comments regarding the 910B.
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The Ascend 910B is considered the successor to the Ascend 910, which was launched by Huawei in August 2019, three months after being placed on a trade blacklist by the US Department of Commerce. Dylan Patel, principal analyst at San Francisco-based semiconductor research firm Semianalysis, said the chip could compete with Nvidia’s A100 in terms of enhanced AI algorithms.
The Chinese flag is displayed near the logo above the headquarters of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. in Shanghai. The country’s top contract chipmaker is said to be the supplier of Huawei Technologies’ new artificial intelligence chipset, the Ascend 910B. Photo: Bloomberg alt=The Chinese flag can be seen near the logo atop Semiconductor Manufacturing International’s headquarters in Shanghai. The country’s top contract chipmaker is said to be the supplier of Huawei Technologies’ new artificial intelligence chipset, the Ascend 910B. Photo: Bloomberg>
“that [the Ascend 910B] Theoretically, it’s a little bit better than A100,” Patel said, adding that the chip is manufactured in a 7-nanometer process by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), a top Chinese foundry. Ta.
US sanctions since 2019 have restricted Huawei’s semiconductor development, severely hurting its smartphone business. But the Shenzhen-based company has quietly expanded its chip business by partnering with various domestic suppliers, according to people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. It is said to be strengthened.
Huawei showed its resilience last August by surprising the industry with the Mate 60 Pro, the company’s first 5G smartphone launch since the Mate 40 series in October 2020. Sales of the new handset have returned Huawei to the top of the domestic smartphone market. market earlier this year.
The SMIC Kirin 9000-series processors in the Mate 60 Pro have sparked intense speculation in the industry about how Huawei managed to overcome the U.S. ban on its chips.
Kirin 9000s processor developed by HiSilicon, the chip design division of Huawei Technologies. Excerpt from the Mate 60 Pro 5G smartphone in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, on September 3, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg alt=A Kirin 9000s processor, developed by Huawei Technologies chip design arm HiSilicon, taken from a Mate 60 Pro 5G smartphone in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, on September 3, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg>
At the time of the domestic launch of the Ascend 910, Huawei touted the chip as “the world’s most powerful AI processor” manufactured using a 7nm process by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, the world’s top contract chip manufacturer. .
Huawei’s new AI chip appears to have arrived around the same time as the release of the Mate 60 Pro last August. According to a November 2023 Reuters report citing people familiar with the matter, Chinese online search and AI giant Baidu ordered 1,600 Huawei Ascend 910B chips in the same month.
Two weeks before Reuters published its report, Chinese AI company iFlytek launched its Feixing One computing platform based on Huawei’s Ascend chip. This means that the company’s latest large-scale language model (LLM), iFlytek Spark 3.0, may have been developed on his AI chip. LLM is a technology used to train generative AI services like ChatGPT.
Huawei declined to comment on the matter.
Jensen Huang, co-founder, president and CEO of American chip design company Nvidia, attends a session at the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, February 12, 2024. Photo: Reuters alt= Jensen Huang, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of American chip design company Nvidia, attends a session at the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, February 12, 2024. Photo: Reuters>
In an interview with tech media outlet Wired last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described Huawei as “a really, really good company.”
“No matter what semiconductor processing technology we have, there are limits, but it is possible to build very large systems by integrating many of these chips,” Huang said.
Reuters reported last month that Huawei and SMIC have allocated more production capacity to AI chips as generative AI gains increased attention and US sanctions tighten over the past year.
One GPU distributor, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue, said the Ascend 910B is “available to order, but supply is very tight at this time.”
The server used for AI training and equipped with eight Ascend 910B cards costs about 1.5 million yuan (US$208,395), which was estimated through black market channels, according to another person familiar with the matter. The price is about the same as the A100 server. also refused to be named.
Huawei made no comment about the Ascend 910B, despite reiterating that AI is a “key strategy” ahead of the company’s exhibit at the four-day MWC Barcelona trade fair in Spain last week. Not yet.
Many analysts and industry experts are hesitant to comment on the Nvidia-Huawei showdown, but the U.S. chip designer has depth in GPUs and hopes developers will unlock the semiconductor’s full potential. He pointed out that it benefits from the software ecosystem CUDA, a computing platform that enables. .
“CUDA is resilient, and Nvidia has done all this hard work on its own and is reaping the benefits,” said Brian Colello, technology equity strategist at Morningstar. “Huawei and its software partners will need to build a comparable ecosystem.” [to Nvidia’s CUDA] When it comes to tools to build AI models. ”
Despite lagging behind CUDA’s 2 million-strong registered developer list, Huawei is a key player in Ascend, a platform that connects hardware and software essential to unlocking AI computing power. It has its own computing architecture for neural networks.
Colello said Huawei may have to make something similar. [big] Invest in mainland China to strengthen software capabilities. He added that while Huawei will focus on chip design, other companies will likely work on software libraries.
“Huawei’s strength is not in its software stack,” said a Shanghai-based tech investor, who requested anonymity. “US sanctions impose limits on chip performance and production yields.”
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative news organization on China and Asia for more than a century. For more stories from SCMP, explore the SCMP app or visit SCMP on Facebook. twitter page. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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