Huawei's First Commercial AI Chip Doubles the Training Performance of Nvidia's Flagship GPU

After a year of development, Huawei today announced the commercial availability of the Huawei Ascend 910 AI computing chip and the machine learning framework MindSpore. Huawei says the Ascend 910 is the world's fastest AI processor, packing twice the performance of rival Nvidia's Tesla v100. Billed as the single chip with the greatest computing density, Ascend 910 delivers performance of up to 256 teraFLOPS under FP16 and 512 teraOPS under IN8 with declared max power consumption of 310W. In comparison, the GPU Tesla V100 delivers up to 125 teraFLOPS with a max power consumption of 300W, while Google's TPU 2.0 with four ASICs can reach 180 teraFLOPS. Ascend 910 is designed for deep learning training, and targets users such data scientists, researchers and engineers.