It looks like Huawei plans to enter the GPU market this year

It looks like Huawei plans to enter the GPU market this year

It looks like Huawei plans to enter the GPU market this year

Sources over at The Elec have claimed that Huawei plans to target Huawei within the server GPU market, creating a discrete graphics chip that’s designed for Cloud and AI applications. 

This graphics card is known as the Ascend 910, and it claims to be the world’s fastest AI processor, promising 256 TeraFLOPs of half-precision floating-point performance and 512 TeraFLOPS of INT8 performance at a planned 310W TDP. 

Huawei’s silicon is built using TSMC’s 7nm (N7) manufacturing process, giving it one step ahead of Nvidia’s 12nm Tesla V100 series graphics cards. In terms of compute performance, Huawei also offers a theoretical 2x speed advantage. That said, it is probably that Nvidia’s TFLOPS are worth a lot more than Huawei’s TFLOPS. 

By 2022, China hopes to replace all foreign hardware within its government institutions, creating the need for companies like Huawei to develop home-grown graphics solutions for use within China. These chips may not become available outside of China, especially if they turn out to be less powerful than competing offerings from Nvidia, AMD and Intel. 

Recent reports have also claimed that the US government is attempting to black Huawei’s access to TSMC, preventing them from using the company’s cutting-edge lithography technology, a factor which could kill off the Ascend 910, at least for now. This would move Huawei’s fabrication to Samsung or China’s own fabs at SMIC. 

If TSMC were to cut Hauwei off, companies like AMD, Nvidia and Apple and others are likely to fill in TSMC’s gap in demand, thanks to the high demand for 7nm silicon fabrication. 
   

It looks like Huawei plans to enter the GPU market this year  

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