Competition intensifies in the Chinese market as Huawei initiates customer sampling for its Ascend 910C GPU, aiming to seize a portion of Nvidia's market share.
Huawei's latest GPU, the Ascend 910C, is set to challenge the AI infrastructure market, particularly in regions where Nvidia currently dominates. The Ascend 910C is an upgraded version of the Ascend 910B, boasting improvements in yield and performance, as well as better integration into larger AI systems.
### Specifications and Performance
The Ascend 910C is at the heart of Huawei's CloudMatrix 384 supernode, a system that features 384 Ascend 910C NPUs and 192 Kunpeng server CPUs interconnected via a high-bandwidth, low-latency unified bus. This architecture significantly boosts overall computational power and efficiency for AI workloads, enabling the CloudMatrix 384 to outperform leading Nvidia GPUs such as the Nvidia H800 in certain benchmarks.
Although detailed raw specs for the 910C compared to the 910B are not explicitly given, the 910C is noted to be more powerful and supports large-scale AI infrastructure solutions that Huawei is pushing internationally.
### Improvements Over Ascend 910B
One of the key improvements in the Ascend 910C is the yield, with reports indicating that Huawei faced challenges with low production yields of these advanced chips. The 910C reflects Huawei’s progress in increasing wafer yield, meaning a higher percentage of usable chips per production batch, leading to better availability and pricing for customers.
The 910C also provides enhanced AI computation capabilities, allowing Huawei's AI cloud systems to outperform Nvidia's equivalents in specific AI models and tasks, especially evidenced by the CloudMatrix 384's benchmark victories over Nvidia H800-based systems.
Huawei's strategy with the 910C also focuses on overcoming US technology export restrictions by improving in-house hardware to rival foreign technologies, even though Huawei acknowledges still being a generation behind in some respects.
### Market and Use Cases
The Ascend 910C powers the CloudMatrix 384, a flagship AI supernode designed to bolster Huawei's presence outside China in markets such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Huawei has started exporting the 910B in limited volumes and is preparing the supply chain and production for higher volume sales of the 910C to strategically important regions, indicating the 910C's role as a more mature, higher-performance product suited for expanding Huawei's global AI computing footprint.
The success of the Ascend 910C depends on it making substantial improvements over the 910B, particularly in terms of yields. If the Ascend 910C doesn't make significant improvements, it could reduce the new chip's profitability.
### Summary
The Ascend 910C represents a notable evolutionary step from the 910B, focused on higher yields and stronger AI performance that make it competitive internationally. Despite ongoing sanctions and supply chain difficulties, Huawei is positioning the Ascend 910C to challenge Nvidia-dominated AI infrastructure markets. The Ascend 910C is expected to launch in October.
Technology and artificial-intelligence-driven gadgets are at the forefront of Huawei's latest strategy, as the Ascend 910C, set to launch in October, aims to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI infrastructure markets. The Ascend 910C, an upgraded version of the Ascend 910B, boasts improved yields, which lead to better availability and pricing for customers, and enhanced AI computation capabilities that enable Huawei's AI cloud systems to outperform Nvidia's equivalents in specific AI models and tasks.
