On the 10th October 2018 at Huawei connectivity conference, Huawei has announced their best product for 5G network and development. The new AI chipset is named under Ascend series and it is launched today!
Their newest and most powerful AI chipset were launched this afternoon at Shenzhen. This has mark its advancement on their AI framework and development progress.
It is understood that the Shengteng 910 is currently the most computationally intensive chip on a single chip, with much more computing power than Google and NVIDIA. The 910 semi-precision (FP16) computing power is 256TFLOPS, which is twice as high as NVIDIA’s Tesla V100. The integer precision (INT8) 512TOPS supports 128 channels of full HD video decoding (H.264/265) and the design power consumption is 350W. The actual measurement reached a specification power of only 310W).
At the same time, Huawei also released the full scene AI calculation framework MindSpore. In addition to the upgrade processor, MindSpore also supports other processors such as GPUs. It is reported that MindSpore will realize open source in the first quarter of 2020 to promote the ecological development of AI industry.
Xu Zhijun revealed that Huawei has used the Ascend 910 for actual AI training tasks. The Ascend 910 and MindSpore show a performance improvement of nearly 2 times compared with the existing mainstream training single card with TensorFlow.
When talking about Huawei’s AI strategy, Xu Zhijun said that Huawei positioning AI is a new general purpose technology, like the 19th century railway and electricity, and the 20th century cars, computers, and the Internet, will be applied to almost all parts of the economy.
At the same time, Huawei also believes that the application of AI is still in the early stage of development, and there is still a big gap between AI technology and capabilities compared to long-term expectations. Reducing or even eliminating these gaps and accelerating the application of AI is the original intention and goal of the Huawei AI strategy.
