Huawei is reportedly preparing a graphics chip on par with Nvidia's popular H100, and will launch it later this year.

Termed the Ascend 910C, it succeeds Huawei's Ascend 910B and is currently being tested by Chinese internet and telecoms firms, according to the Wall Street Journal. The current-generation Ascend 910B, which debuted as early as 2022, is said to be as fast as Nvidia's A100 from 2020; with H100 levels of performance, the Ascend 910C would be a substantial step up.

According to the report's anonymous sources, Baidu, China Mobile, and TikTok-owner ByteDance are all interested in obtaining some Ascend 910C chips. Huawei is said to have already received at least 70k orders for the 910C, worth roughly two billion dollars.

However, development of the company's new graphics processor has been troubled by the US government's sanctions, which has caused delays. Huawei has to contend with the usual problems like lack of access to advanced process nodes, inability to acquire chipmaking tools from firms like ASML, and perhaps most importantly for a datacenter GPU, not being able to (legally) import high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips.

It's not that surprising, since the Ascend 910B has suffered from the very same issues, and Huawei has resorted to strategically stockpiling machine parts and chips.

Huawei may be able to solve these issues, though. The company is building a complex to develop and produce chipmaking equipment in China itself, and is reportedly in an alliance with other Chinese semiconductor companies that intend to produce HBM chips domestically.

In the short term, however, these issues may cause Huawei to delay the Ascend 910C past October and potentially alter its specifications, likely downwards.

The 910C will compete primarily with Nvidia's H20, which was launched earlier this year to replace the H800 after the US government banned it from China like it did the H100. The H20's graphics chip itself isn't particularly impressive compared to the H100, with 96 GB of HBM3 memory and 4 TBps worth of bandwidth - lots of fast memory is crucial for developing and running AI software like large language models (LLMs).

Nvidia is also making a B20 based on Blackwell, and Intel has its made-for-China Gaudi 3 processors.

If the Ascend 910C can catch up to the H100, Huawei will have a pretty substantial advantage in raw graphics prowess. If paired with lots of fast HBM chips, it could also be a potent choice for AI too. Nvidia is apparently already struggling to compete in China with the H20, which it has already discounted at least once.

The Register asked Huawei to comment. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/13/huaweis_ascend_910_launches_this/