Huawei unveils Ascend 910 AI chip, MindSpore

Huawei is boosting its position in the growing cloud services market as it unveiled its new Ascend 910 AI (artificial intelligence) chip and Mindspore AI framework. 

Huawei Ascend 910

The world's most powerful AI chip?

The Chinese tech giant has joined industry players Nvidia, Intel, Google and Qualcomm in offering new types of hardware for machine learning. 

Targeted for firms using AI applications, which demand huge amounts of data to train smart algorithms, Huawei's Ascend 910 provides 256 TeraFLOPS for a half-precision floating-point (FP16) operations and 512 TeraOPS for integer precision calculations (INT8), while having a max power consumption of 310W. 

Huawei claimed Ascend 910 is the world's most powerful AI processor as it could process more data in a faster amount of time than its rivals in the market. 

Ascend 910 performs much better than we expected. It has more computing power than any other AI processor in the world, Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu. 

Huawei MindSpore

Huawei's MindSpore, meanwhile, is an AI computing framework, supporting the development of AI applications. 

MindSpore complements Ascend 910, Huawei said, noting users would experience two times faster at training AI models than other mainstream training cards using TensorFlow. 

The launch of these two was part of the group's strategy as Huawei has long expressed a desire to create a complete AI ecosystem. 

Huawei’s AI strategy is to invest in basic research and talent development, build a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio, and foster an open global ecosystem, Xu said. 

Source: GizmoChina