It was only a matter of time … Huawei’s Ascend series of GPUs features 7nm+ technology with a speed of 256TeraFLOPS.
Huawei Technologies will be installing a Cloud and AI Business Group in Korea this year in a bid to penetrate the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) server market currently dominated by NVidia. The business group may later on be spun off for further growth, according to industry sources on April 3.
Huawei is currently recruiting experts for this new organization, including former and current employees and executives from NVidia.
In August 2019, Huawei unveiled its Ascend 910, calling it the world’s most high-quality AI processor. Ascend 910 recorded a speed of 256TeraFLOPS. This is about twice the speed of NVidia’s GPU Tesla V100. Ascend 910 is made via the 7nm+ technology, while Tesla V100 is with the 12nm.
A month after revealing Ascend 910, Huawei announced the Atlas 900, saying it was the world’s fastest AI training cluster. The key purpose is to study weather forecast, autonomous driving, oil exploration and space observation, among others.
In January 2020, Huawei announced the Kunpeng 920, which is a server CPU aimed at big data calculations and dispersed storage. It was based on the ARMv8 architecture, and formed of the 2.6GHz 64 Core. Power efficiency was improved 30% in this model, according to Huawei. On the same day, Huawei released the Taishan server series, which is run by Kunpeng 920.
In 2019, Huawei created an umbrella Cloud & AI Business Group at its headquarters. Carriers, BG, Enterprise BG, Network& Solution, along with ICT businesses all belong to this group. Huawei Korea is formed of three different divisions: Carriers, Enterprise and Consumer. The new Cloud & AI BG in Korea will be placed under the Enterprise division.
Huawei is reportedly making the finishing touches on a multi-year effort to build the first Chinese discrete GPU for the server and HPC markets.
The GPU market is about to have a new player, and it comes from China. According to a report from a South Korean publication, Huawei is setting up a new division in the country called the Cloud and AI Business Group to take on Nvidia and AMD in the enterprise space.
The Chinese tech giant is said to be readying its first GPUs for a late 2020 release, with its eyes set on the server and supercomputer markets – at least at first. To that end, it has reportedly hired a few former Nvidia engineers, but the company wants to attract most of the needed talent from South Korea, which is where the new division will set up shop.
Normally, you’d think that Huawei would focus solely on its ARM efforts, since this is the area where it has built a considerable amount of intellectual property over the years. It has managed to beat Qualcomm in the race to 7nm, as well as producing the first high-end mobile SoC with integrated 5G capabilities. For enterprise systems, it has built the Kunpeng 920 – a 180W, 64-core, ARM-based server CPU that is currently being evaluated by companies like Tencent for cloud gaming services.
However, there’s at least one reason why Huawei might want to expand its horizons – the company has already built several AI accelerator solutions that are able to compete with those of Nvidia. For instance, Huawei’s Ascend 910 chip is able to deliver 256 teraflops of half-precision performance, which is two times faster than Nvidia’s Tesla V100 solution in certain scenarios.
Source: Techspot
