What is The Ascend 910?
The Ascend 910 is an AI-powered computing chip which can be used for AI model training. Upon testing, Huawei claims the chip is performing better than they expected. The Ascend 910 scored 256 TeraFLOPS for half-precision floating-point (FP16) operations, and 512 TeraOPS for integer precision calculations (INT8).
What is The Ascend 910?What is MindSpore?What does this mean for the future of Huawei?
On top of this, it is doing so with a max power consumption of 310W only, which is lower than its consumption of 350W. This puts the chip as one of the most powerful in the world.
What is MindSpore?
Huawei’s MindSpore is an AI computing framework which offers easy development, smooth execution and above all is adaptable to all situations. This framework is necessary for enabling secure, pervasive AI. This also secures user privacy as it deals with gradient and model information which is being processed by the chip. Developers would love to work with MindSpore as it has 20% fewer lines of core code than a most open-source framework in the market, and thus raise its efficiency by at least 50%. Huawei also hinted that MindSpore would go open-source in 2020.
What does this mean for the future of Huawei?
Huawei’s AI portfolio covers all basis and is full-stack. It includes a powerful AI chip in Ascend 910, a chip enablement layer CANN, an all-scenario framework MindSpore, and application enablement platform called ModelArts. This launch only means good things for Huawei as AI will be an integral part of all sector in the coming future, and they have developed a product which is cheaper and better than the rest of the product.
