Huawei Ascend Processors

2024:80% of Huawei processors in Chinese factories marry

In early July 2024, it became known that four out of five Huawei Ascend 910B AI accelerators, which are manufactured at Chinese enterprises, have certain defects. In other words, 80% of these products leave factories with marriage.

Ascend 910B accelerators, as well as Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 9000S processors for, smartphones are manufactured using 7nm technology at Chinese enterprises. SMIC Ascend 910B solutions are considered as an alternative to AI accelerators Nvidia based on GPUs - primarily the A100. However, according to Tom's Hardware, the production efficiency of Huawei accelerators remains extremely low.

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As of 2024, almost all large and complex processors produced have any defects, but this does not make them completely unusable. Suppliers disable cores or certain functions so that the chip can be applied despite a production defect. However, this can lead to a decrease in performance - for example, due to a decrease in the clock speed of the cores.

Unlike TSMC and Samsung Foundry, which use EUV lithography tools to make chips using advanced technological processes, SMIC has to rely on older equipment. Because of this, the number of production stages increases, costs increase and the likelihood of scrap increases. China's ability to purchase modern semiconductor machines is limited due to US sanctions. This negatively affects the potential of Chinese companies, including Huawei, to develop business in the field of AI and other promising technologies. On the other hand, the PRC is actively implementing various programs aimed at expanding its own chip production.^[1]

2020: Plan for ensuring technological compatibility with MyOffice software

On October 27, 2020, Huawei announced that it had entered into a technology partnership agreement with New Cloud Technologies. MyOffice will take part in the creation of the Ascend and Kunpeng software and hardware ecosystem. Read more here.

2019: Basis for 43 Huawei Cloud services

On September 20, 2019, the company Huawei officially announced the launch of the 43s cloud services based on processors Ascend in. With Huawei Cloud their help, Huawei is committed to providing computing capabilities for universal access cloud computing technology and intelligent solutions. More. here

2018

The composition of the line and the path of Elbrus developers

As of October 22, 2018, the Ascend line includes two AI chips. The first of them - Ascend 310 - was created using 12 nm technology and is already available on the market.

A more advanced processor - the Ascend 910 - will see the light of day in the second quarter of 2019. It is created using 7nm technology and promises to be twice as powerful as a chip that Huawei considers its closest competitor, the Nvidia Tesla V100. The company notes that with slightly higher power consumption compared to the V100 (350 W versus 300 W), the Ascend 910 has a performance of 256 TFLOPS versus 125 TFLOPS from a competitor.

In general, Huawei Ascend series processors, optimized for solving artificial intelligence (AI) problems, can conceptually be considered the heirs of ideas that once formed the basis for the development of the Soviet Elbrus platform, in whose architecture the principle of explicit parallelism of operations was laid down. This follows from the words of the director of solutions of the Huawei Cloud direction in Russia Arthur Pärn.

At one time, we, studying at the VMK Moscow State University, studied the history of the creation of the Soviet computer "Elbrus," - recalls Arthur Pärn. - And it just laid down and implemented the principle of separation of functional tasks. It had not only a central superscalar processor, but also added various specialized coprocessors that performed, for example, decomposition into Fourier rows or some other transformations, unloading the central processor. And, in fact, Huawei took a similar path, shifting the solution of individual tasks to specialized chips. From the developer's point of view, this provides greater opportunities for more efficient load utilization. [[2]

Sales of servers with Ascend chips

In October 2018, Huawei announced sales of its first servers running on the Chinese company's own processors. The new initiative aims to expand Huawei's cloud business.

As part of the third annual international forum for the ICT industry, Huawei Connect 2018 introduced the 7nm Huawei Ascend 910 chipset, which, according to the developers, is twice as powerful as its closest rival, the Nvidia V100. This processor will be released in the second quarter of 2019, and the Ascend 310 chip , which was announced simultaneously, immediately entered the commercial market.

Huawei started selling servers with its own chips

Huawei does not plan to supply these processors to third-party customers and intends to use them only in its equipment in order to prevent direct competition with chip manufacturers, said Eric Xu, CEO of the Chinese company.

According to the Reuters news agency, Huawei has a semiconductor division (Hisilicon) that develops chips for the company's smartphones and telecommunications equipment, but the servers that Huawei sold to telecom operators and cloud providers were based mainly on Intel solutions. What proportion of supplied Huawei servers will be based on their own processors has not been disclosed.

Huawei calls the Ascend line the world's first artificial intelligence technology processors focused on the full range of scenarios with optimal TeraOPS/watt. The company noted in the chips "outstanding performance per watt in any use case, be it minimal power consumption or maximum computing capabilities in data centers." Their unified architecture facilitates the implementation, migration and interaction of AI applications in various scenarios, Huawei emphasized.^[3]

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