Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Huewei Free from US With RISC-V and Ascend Chips












Huawei has launched its 7nm Ascend 910 artificial intelligence chip for data centers together with a new comprehensive AI framework MindSpore. The announcement comes at a time when Huawei is facing pressure from the US government, which Huawei is responding to by considering using the open-source RISC-V.

Ascend 910 and MindSpore


Huawei already talked about the Ascend 910 in October last year, but the present announcement marks the commercial availability of the chip, which Huawei claims is the world’s most powerful AI processor. Moreover, Huawei claims that the chip reaches its planned performance targets with lower power than anticipated: the Ascend 910 delivers 256 half-precision TFLOPS in a power envelope of 310W compared to the previously-announced 350W. Performance doubles to 512 TOPS for 8-bit integer calculations (INT8).

Manufactured on TSMC’s 7nm process, The Ascent 910 serves as a neural processing unit for training AI models (as opposed to inference) in the data center, but Huawei says it is also investing in silicon for other compute scenarios, such as edge computing, devices, and autonomous vehicles.




In a similar vein, Huawei has launched MindSpore, a development framework for AI applications in all scenarios. The framework aims to help with three goals: easy development, efficient execution and adaptable to all scenarios. In other words, the framework should aid to train models at the lowest cost  and time, with the highest performance per watt, for all use cases.

Another key design point of MindSpore is privacy. The company says that MindSpore doesn’t process the data itself, but instead “deals with gradient and model information” that has already been processed. Huawei describes its framework as an “AI algorithm as code” design flow. As an example, Huawei claims that for natural language processing (NLP), MindSpore has 20% fewer lines of code and raises developers’ efficiency by 50% compared to the current leading frameworks. Huawei also claims that combination of MindSpore with the Ascend 910 achieves double the performance in ResNet-50 compared to “other mainstream training cards” (likely Nvidia’s V100) with TensorFlow.

MindSpore supports both its Ascend processor as well as CPUs, GPUs and “other types of processors.” Huawei also disclosed that it would open source MindSpore in the first quarter of 2020 in support of a robust AI ecosystem. Huawei’s Rotating Chairman, Xu, said: “We promised a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio. And today we delivered.”

MindSpore joins a sizeable collection of AI frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe, and Theano. Nvidia continues to reign supreme in the data center DL training market as other companies begin more focused development efforts. Intel recently described its 16nm Spring Crest NNP-T accelerator at HotChips to take on Nvidia (with initial availability later this year). Spring Crest does not have INT8, but it does support the young bfloat16 format, albeit at half the FLOPS as the Ascend’s FP16 performance. However, Intel spent a lot of work on the interconnect to scale up to hundreds of nodes, a capability that Huawei has not mentioned.

Seeking US Independence

Also on Friday, Huawei said that it would consider using RISC-V if the US government restrictions persist. Huawei’s launch schedule is currently not impacted by a US ban because the company already has obtained a license to the ARMv8 architecture. However, there is a possibility that Huawei won’t be able to use ARM’s new technologies in the future.

Even though ARM is a UK company, some of its technologies are developed in the US, so it has to comply with the ban. “If ARM's new technologies are not available in the future, we can also use RISC-V, an architecture which is open to all companies. The challenge is not insurmountable,” Xu said. Huawei is already a member of the RISC-V Foundation. However, the company also said it had not started any efforts yet to migrate to RISC-V, preferring to continue using ARM.

RISC-V is not the only open instruction set architecture (ISA), as IBM recently made its POWER instruction set open source.











Monday, August 19, 2019

Trump has delayed its ban on trade with Huawei by another three months

According to the comments by the US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross

The Chinese tech company had been granted a temporary license to allow US firms to continue to trade with the company, with the aim to allow them "a little more time to wean themselves off" Huawei products. It was due to expire today, however the expiration date has been pushed back to September.

 This temporary license enables companies such as Google to continue working with Huawei. Huawei depends on Google for access to its Android operating system, the software which powers its smartphones.

One of the reason the Huawei was given temporary license and the expiration date that has been pushed back to September is due to
ARM and Qualcomm in United States. Back in July, Qualcomm said its sales fell in the previous quarter partly as a result of not being allowed to sell to the Chinese firm.(Huawei),
Google will lose more than 150 million customers if Huawei and another Chinese players use a stripped down open source version of Android then securing users accessing Google services like Gmail, Google Drive and others from these devices would be difficult as Google will have little control.
 Huawei phone beat IPhone and every United States phones in Global market which make Donal Trump to be afraid of China taken over global trade.

Huawei phone has proof to be the best phone in the world but is a pity is not coming from United States.


       


Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Chinese state media hints at Huawei OS this year






Chinese state-owned media outlet Global Times reports Huawei is testing its smartphone armed with the self-developed Hongmeng operating system (OS).

According to the report, the phone could reach the market at the end of this year, targeting low- and medium-end markets and priced at around 2 000 yuan ($288) to attract software developers and users to join the ecosystem.

It adds Huawei is set to release the much-anticipated Hongmeng OS, an alternative to Google’s Android OS, at Huawei’s Developer Conference on 9 August in Dongguan, South China’s Guangdong province.

The report comes after Huawei last week announced revenue increase of 23.2% in the first half of 2019, despite the company getting caught up in the trade war between the world’s biggest economies – US and China.

As the trade war between the US and China rages on, the former, which put Huawei on an export blacklist citing national security issues, has been rallying its allies to cut Huawei out of planned 5G networks, citing “national security threats” due to the company’s close ties to the Chinese government.

The blacklist has seen companies, including Alphabet’s Google and British chip designer ARM, limit or cease their relationships with the Chinese company.

Huawei has denied installing any backdoors in its networking equipment for alleged government spying.

Google is still banned from doing business with Huawei, although some exemptions are allowed but must be applied for.





Google’s parent Alphabet announced it would suspend any business that “requires the transfer of hardware, software and technical services except those publicly available via open source licensing”.

It also means Huawei technology would no longer receive software updates, be upgraded to new versions of Android, or have access to the Google Play Store and services as a result. This would lock Huawei devices out of the app store and mean popular services like Google Maps, Music, YouTube and Assistant will not work.

The Google ban would mean future Huawei phones and tablets would no longer have an Android licence.

“If the US government allows us to use Android, we will use Android. But if the US doesn’t allow us, then we will turn to alternatives. As for how ready our OS is, you’ll just have to see with your own eyes,” said Huawei chairman Liang Hua, announcing the company’s results last week.

Hongmeng is an OS under development by Huawei since 2012. To date and despite speculation, the company has not yet publicly designated an official name on the release of the OS.

The OS had originally been announced as a replacement for Android in response to financial sanctions imposed on Huawei by the US in 2019, but by July, Huawei executives had begun to describe Hongmeng as being an “industrial” embedded OS designed for Internet of things hardware, discarding the previous statements for it to be a smartphone mobile operating system.

However, according to Global Times, Huawei executives have now said if Google insists on cutting off supply of its OS to Huawei, the Hongmeng OS may expand to the smartphone business.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the report says one of the tests Huawei is running on the Hongmeng OS is its compatibility with Android applications.

The system also has cryptographic functions that protect personal data better and prevent users’ privacy from being breached, it adds.





Thursday, August 1, 2019

HUAWEI STABILIZES ITS SECOND POSITION IN THE GLOBAL SMARTPHONE MARKET

Chinese manufacturing giant, Huawei, is going against all odds to post a strong statement to the world. Irrespective of the US ban which many believe will comatose the company, Huawei’s 2019 shipments have been amazing. The company is still the largest OEM in China and its Q2 2019 shipment in China increased by 38% YoY. Recently, Strategy Analytics released the global smartphone market shipments report for Q2 2019. According to the report, the global smartphone shipments fell by 3% year-on-year to 341 million units (for Q2 2019).
             

Samsung retains its first position with 22.3% of the global smartphone market share. Huawei ranks second with 17.2% while Apple is third with 11.1% market share. Xiaomi and Oppo are fourth and fifth with 9.4% and 8.7% market share respectively.

Samsung’s global smartphone shipments were 76.3 million units in Q2 this year, up 7% YoY. It’s market share increased from 20% to 22%. Entry-level smartphones were vital to Samsung’s performance but the profit margin is low due to fierce competition. As for Huawei, its global smartphone shipments grew 8% year-on-year, from 54.2 million in Q2 in 2018 to 58.7 million in Q2 in 2019. Huawei’s global smartphone market share was 17% (Q2 2019), up from 15% a year ago. Huawei is flying high in China as it seeks to compensate for regulatory uncertainty in other major regions such as North America and Western Europe.

Apple iPhone shipments were 38 million units for the quarter under consideration. Its global smartphone market share was 11%, down 1% from 12% a year ago. Apple iPhone shipments fell 8% year-on-year, the worst performer among the top five smartphone players in the world. Looking at Xiaomi, its global smartphone market share of 9% is basically the same as last year. Xiaomi is still very strong in India, but in China it is trying to catch up with Huawei. Like Xiaomi, Oppo’s 9% market share is not much different from last year. It is reported that OPPO is entering the Western European market through new models such as Reno 5G, but it still faces competitive pressure from Huawei in China.