Huawei Ascend 920 artificial intelligence (AI) chip was launched in China last weekend as an alternative to the NVIDIA H20 chip that is currently banned by the United States. The Ascend 920 uses SMIC’s 6nm technology and is an update to the Asend 910c which uses SMIC’s 7nm technology.
The Ascend 920 chip’s performance is 900 TFLOPS, memory bandwidth of 4,000 GB/s and offers a performance improvement of 30-40% better than the previous generation Ascend chip. With China being restricted from purchasing AI chips with US technology, using locally made AI chips is the only alternative for Chinese companies.
Last week Huawei launched the CloudMatrix 384 AI computer system as a competitor to NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 with higher performance but more power consumption and more chips than the Ascend 910c. The trade war between China and the United States shows no sign of ending anytime soon. This will drive innovation from both sides who want to free themselves from dependence on each other.