CHINA: HUAWEI ASCEND 920 CHIP LEADS THE WORLD IN AI

Written by Michael Thervil

Despite American sanctions China wins in the technology sector. With Huawei unveiling its new “Ascend 920” Artificial Intelligence chip. According to many tech industry experts, Huawei newest AI chip is set to fill the current gap left by Nvidia as they essentially bowed down to the Trumps Administrations “Maximum Pressure” campaign and ceased providing China with the newest AI chip technology in an attempt to control, slow down, and sabotage China’s ambitions to be a top competitor in the both the worlds technology market and free market. What's funny about this is that Nvidia stated that it would still make products for the Chinese market, but exactly what those products will be are still in question.

Huawei’s new Ascend 920 AI chip was constructed on semiconductor manufacturing international corporation (SMIC) 6 nanometer process N+3 nodes. Moreover, the Ascend 920 chip is expected to be mass produced in the second half of this year and has been said to be exponentially faster than Nvidia’s H20 AI chip based on the fact it’s boosting 900 teraflops with memory bandwidth that spans 4,000 gigabits per second or 4 terabytes per second significantly outperforming Nvidia’s h20 (NVL72) chip with only 200 gigabytes per second. This put Huawei’s Ascend 920 chips roughly 30-40% faster than its previous mass-produced chip. The power and performance of Huawei’s Ascend 920 chip is exponentially faster and even more efficient in terms of performance when clustered with other Ascend 920 chips. It was also reported that Huawei’s Ascend 920 uses four times the amount of power than existing Nvidia chips for larger applications.

With all these new developments happening in China with the technology and Artificial Intelligence sector, the question is what’s going to become of the American chip manufacturing market? With Nvidia building new manufacturing facilities in Dallas, Houston, and Arizona at the same time China is seemingly unleashing it’s newest chips on the world, how will Nvidia keep up? Also, it should be noted that with China Huawei releasing for public use the Ascend 920 chip in the second half of this year, its predicted by many tech industry insiders that China will more than likely be ahead of the curb in terms of modifying the Ascend 920 chip to be faster and even more efficient while working on an entirely new chip to replace the Ascend 920 chip.

There are several driving forces for this prediction which consist of the combination of technological advancements, global energy needs, market forces, global demand for more efficient and productive AI models, methods of chip production, and of course the new discoveries in both materials, elements and AI applications. Backing this prediction is the fact that Huawei has already developed the Ascend 920c, which is another variant of the Ascend 920 chip which is constructed and optimized for what is known as a “Mixture of Expert” models (MoE) and the transformation of such. The Ascend 920c variant chip is also configured to not only be more efficient but offer enhanced tensor operation accelerators. The Ascend 920c is a scaled down version of the Ascend 920 chip and costs less than the Nvidia chip of the class.

Is the future of American chip manufacturing and Nvidia ready to take a back seat to China’s Huawei? It seems as if they do something soon, they just may have to.