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.