About Huawei Ascend
Ascend is Huawei's line of AI accelerator chips, designed by its HiSilicon subsidiary and including the Ascend 310, 910, 910B and 910C. They use Huawei's Da Vinci architecture, which has dedicated cube units for the matrix multiplication at the heart of neural networks. They run with Huawei's own software stack, including the CANN library and the MindSpore framework, which gives Chinese buyers an alternative to Nvidia's tools. Huawei is based in Shenzhen, China, and HiSilicon is wholly owned by Huawei.
Huawei Ascend was founded in 2018 and is based in Shenzhen, China. It is listed under AI Accelerators, Custom Silicon, HPC & AI Systems.
Compute Technologies
- AI Accelerators
- Custom Silicon
What Huawei Ascend works on
AI Accelerators
An AI accelerator is a chip, or a part of a chip, designed to run machine learning faster or with less energy than a general-purpose processor. The category includes GPUs, TPUs, neural processing units (NPUs) and chips from many startups.
Custom Silicon
Custom silicon means a company designs its own chips for its own products or data centers instead of buying standard parts. The chip is made by a foundry such as TSMC, but the design belongs to the customer.
HPC & AI Systems
High-performance computing (HPC) means using very large clusters of processors working together to solve problems that one machine cannot handle in a reasonable time. These clusters are called supercomputers. They run weather models, physics simulations and, increasingly, AI training.
Also in China
T-Head (Alibaba), Sunway, VeriSilicon, Chiplego, Moore Threads
