Will Huawei’s Ascend 920 be able to replace NVIDIA’s H20 chips across the Chinese market?
Last week, amidst the looming trade war, the US put limitations on NVIDIA. The H20 chips, which were specially designed owing to the US’s export regulations, now require special access to sell in China.
The US wonders if it’s allowing China more access to power than it should. This limitation tightened the grip on selling AI chips to China, which could add an extra computing edge to its supercomputers.
While this was disappointing news for NVIDIA, its Chinese competitors foresaw this as an opportunity.
Huawei has spent the last couple of years attempting to match NVIDIA’s capabilities. While its previous 910C processors were only able to match 60% of H20’s inference performance, the new variants promise to be more efficient.
Huawei Technologies is stepping up its game by launching a new AI chip, the Ascend 920. Being introduced as an alternative to NVIDIA’s H20 processors, the tech company will begin its mass shipment next month.
Additionally, Huawei claims that the Ascend 910 processor’s capabilities are comparable to the H20 because it has two 910B processors integrated into it.
Introduced only recently to the public, Huawei kept this chip’s manufacturing under wraps. But announced it to the market as soon as the US restrictions on NVIDIA’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308.
Amid significant market changes, Huawei’s chips could attract serious attention from Chinese tech giants.