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Huawei's Ascend 910C delivers 60% of Nvidia H100 inference performance
- lostmsu 2y agoNo, it doesn't. Where are the flops/tops?
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoIt has around 1/4th of flops of H100[1], but it could still get 60% for inference if it has higher than half of memory bandwidth. [1]: https://www1.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seem5730/l22/06%20Atlas%20AI%20Computing%20Platform_ALEX.pdf https://www1.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seem5730/l22/06%20Atlas%20AI%20...
- lostmsu 2y agoBandwidth bottleneck applies only to non-batched inference on single accelerator setups.
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoEven for batched it applies if the batch size couldn't be super high due to memory size.
- lostmsu 2y agoIf you're memory bandwidth bound, you're using the chips wrong and may better be served by stacking DDR5.
- im3w1l 2y agoWhere is it sold?
- viraptor 2y agoThe key piece of information is missing though - at what price and energy cost. For the first sample it sounds exciting, but... they'll have to compete with the cost of smuggling Nvidia into the country.
- thorncorona 2y agoIt doesn't matter. Matters of national security don't get killed for economic reasons.
- threatripper 2y agoIt always matters to some degree but you can spend much much more to get an edge for national security. 10x maybe 100x compared to the free market but not infinite.
- viraptor 2y agoIt wouldn't get killed, but it may end up like Baikal, Elbrus and others - kept around just in case, but not really used instead of bought/smuggled chips.
- threatripper 2y agoEven if price and energy is 10x it will not slow down AI development much once the Chinese government starts pouring in big money.
- DSingularity 2y agoAgree on price but what you are suggesting on energy is likely not true. More energy is likely more power (if you decide that the performance matters). More power means you cant network enough of these chips together at the scales needed for training. And that means they havent really solved the problem (although likely they are progressing nicely towards the solution).
- threatripper 2y ago
- willvarfar 2y ago> This suggests that Huawei's AI processor's capabilities are advancing rapidly, despite sanctions by the U.S. government and the lack of access to leading-edge process technologies of TSMC. So chipping away at Taiwan's "silicon shield" (the defence strategy that an attack on Taiwan would deny China of the chips it needs itself). Soon China can have a security situation with Taiwan (doesn't really matter if it actually invades, or just has a hotting-up conflict with rocket exchange) to choke off supplies of high-end chips to the West whilst domestic alternatives ramp up?
- killingtime74 2y agoDon't need China to choke off chips. Trump is doing that himself with tariffs
- noxs 2y agoChina's territorial claims over Taiwan starts from 1949 since the civil war ends. [1] The semiconductor doesn't play significant factor here. It only becomes hot topics in past few years because of TSMC's lead on its process, but really doesn't have any direct relationships. In other words, current situation is a result of U.S. "Asia-Pacific Rebalance" strategy and military deployment over the first island chain [2] that China wanted the island regardless of TSMC. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain
- vl 2y agoSince we just entered AGI arms-race, semiconductor industry has direct relation. I think China will capture Taiwan in the next two years.
- suraci 2y agothere's no AGI arms-race in china > He stressed that China will not blindly follow trends or engage in unrestrained international competition. With a robust governance and regulatory system in place, China is confident in its ability to manage and utilize AI technology effectively https://www.geopolitechs.org/p/chinas-vice-premier-ding-xuexiang https://www.geopolitechs.org/p/chinas-vice-premier-ding-xuex... IIRC, this speech was given just after Stargate announced
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoWhat about yields? Even if it is 600% faster but yields are 1000x worse, it doesn’t mean much commercially. But if this is an old chip that is easy to fab with equipment China has easy access to, then it is a big deal.
- tmnvdb 2y agoSMIC makes the Ascend 910c using its N+2 process—basically TSMC’s 7nm equivalent—and ASML’s TWINSCAN NXT:2000i DUV immersion lithography machines. But with yields stuck around 20% late last year, it's far from commercial-grade. GlobalFoundries and Intel have also wrestled with yield issues on this node, so it's no walk in the park. Expect the Chinese government to keep funding it for a few more years, but by then, the tech might be a bit dated—TSMC's been producing 7nm chips commercially since 2018.
- chvid 2y agoThe yield is much higher as indicating by Huawei using their 7nm process in mid range phones and tablets for export. Bottle neck now is likely in high bandwidth memory.
- rickdeckard 2y ago- The Kirin 9000s die used in Huawei's phones/tablets is 107 mm². - SMIC's Ascend 910B has a die size of 665.61mm², which is more than 6x larger. - The AI chiplet of Ascend 910 itself is already significantly larger than the whole Kirin 9000s die. There's no data on it from SMIC, but when TSMC produced it with equivalent N7+ process, it was 456.25mm² (>4x larger) I don't know about the rumored 20% yield, but this difference in die-size alone would dramatically impact yield for the Ascend design. And that's just ONE factor. SMIC could have achieved a 90% yield with Kirin 9000s and still be at 20% with Ascend 910...
- chvid 2y agoThat is for the old 910B which was fabbed on TSMC. The rumors I have seen is that 910C is a chiplet design. Anyway. Since the company doesn't publish these numbers everything is secondary sources and dominated (at least in the English language media) by politics. What you can do is look at objective indicators such as what gets sold (phones, computers) where (China, outside China). And prices and availability of Chinese cloud computing and AI products. A big thing would be for the Huawei 910C to show up outside China.
- kome 2y agowhy don't they use Loongson? are they also manufactured by Huawei?
- logicchains 2y agoLoongson are CPUs, not GPUs.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoFor now, but that seems to be changing https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Loongson+GPU+9A2000 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Loongson+GPU+9A2000
- ein0p 2y agoThe US also has comparable hardware, and it had it for a while: Intel Gaudi. Similar perf characteristics, works very well for inference, costs substantially less than H100. The entire field seems to be drowning in money, so no one gives a shit.
- buyucu 2y agoThis is great news. More competition will be good.
- Havoc 2y agoThat seems good enough to make a China State brute force approach viable
- derelicta 2y agoI still can't wrap my head around as to why Americans are so hostile towards the PRC
- lyzml_AF 2y ago[dead]
- DrNosferatu 2y agoAt what percentage of the final product price and market availability? (note this can go both ways)
- buyucu 2y agoMost important question: does it support PyTorch and llama.cpp?