Huawei Touts Superiority of Ascend 910B AI Accelerators Over Nvidia’s Earlier Generation Solutions

Huawei Technologies boasts a superior performance of its data accelerators over Nvidia’s A100s, despite the latter being two generations behind the West’s latest offerings. The specific nature of the Chinese market enables local competitors to take pride in overtaking even such solutions by Nvidia.

Huawei Claims its Ascend 910B Surpasses Nvidia’s A100

At the ambitiously titled World Semiconductor Conference in Nanjing, China, the Operations Director of Huawei’s Ascend and Kunpeng ecosystem product division presented data claiming that Huawei’s Ascend 910B accelerators surpass Nvidia’s A100 in a series of computational tests by up to 20%. While training large language models, Chinese accelerators exhibit efficiency levels corresponding to 80% of the Nvidia A100’s performance, according to the Huawei representative. He stated that there’s little difference between using Nvidia A100 and Ascend 910B when training major language models. This is particularly relevant to local customers, given the US ban on supplying Nvidia A100s and newer US-made accelerators to China.

Huawei’s Ascend Ecosystem Reaches Numerous Partners

Last month, Huawei representatives announced that the Ascend accelerator ecosystem already encompasses 40 hardware manufacturers, 1,600 software development partners, and up to 2,900 applications for artificial intelligence (AI). Major Chinese clients of Huawei in this field include Tencent and Baidu, as well as promising startups such as iFlyTek—all of whom have begun purchasing the Ascend 910B accelerators. Computing clusters based on these accelerators already operate in 19 major cities across China and will soon be introduced in administrative centers of large provinces.