Huawei makes its Ascend 910 processor official, which according to the company is its most powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered processor. Moreover, the processor bundles up the new all-in-one AI Computing framework dubbed MindSpore.
Huawei confirms that these new technologies hold the potential to confront the US giants such as Qualcomm and Nvidia.
The AI-powered Ascend 910 is built upon Da Vinci system architecture and promises better performance compared to the last year’s initial version.
Ascend 910 delivers 256 TeraFLOPS for half-precision floating-point (FP16). Similarly, it delivers 512 TeraOPS for integer precision calculation (INT8). And its maximum power consumption is just 310W, which is much lower than its planned specs (350W), despite its unrivaled performance.
The Rotating Chairman at Huawei, Eric Xu said, “Ascend 910 performs much better than we expected. Without a doubt, it has more computing power than any other AI processor in the world.”
And when compared with TensorFlow, Ascend 910 combined with MindSpore is nearly twice faster at training AI models in a typical training session. MindSpore is an AI computing framework that allows the development of AI applications in all scenarios across all devices, edge, and cloud environments.
As per Huawei, MindSpore carries 20% fewer lines of core codes in a typical neural network for natural language processing (NLP) in comparison to other leading frameworks available in the market, thus allowing developers raise their efficiency by 50% in minimum.
Xu stated, “MindSpore will go open source in the first quarter of 2020, and will help developers for further development.”
