Huawei and Nvidia Face-off in Technology Race: Unveiling Future Plans for Ascend Chips and In-house Technologies like HBM and SuperPoDs
Huawei has announced a new lineup of AI products, including the upcoming Ascend 950, 960, and 970 chips, and new SuperPoDs. The new chips are part of Huawei's roadmap for continuous new AI products, similar to that of Nvidia and AMD.
The Ascend 950DT will have 144GB of HBM memory with a bandwidth of 4TB/s, while the Ascend 950PR will have 128GB of HBM memory with a bandwidth of 1.6TB/s. Both variants of the Ascend 950 are scheduled for release in 2026.
Huawei has developed its own HBM memory, which will be used in the new Ascend chips. The company has also revealed that it will manufacture the SuperPoDs that include 64 Atlas 960 chips, which are expected to be launched in 2027. These SuperPoDs will nearly double the number of chips compared to the Atlas 950 SuperPoDs.
The Atlas 950 SuperPoDs contain 524,288 chips in total, and the Atlas 960 SuperPoD, which contains 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, is expected to be launched in 2027. The Ascend 960 will have a total of 288GB of memory with a bandwidth of 9.6TB/s.
Huawei's new SuperPoDs, including the Atlas 950 and Atlas 960, are designed to outscale Nvidia's solutions in the field of artificial intelligence. The SuperCluster, consisting of 64 Atlas 950 SuperPoDs, is designed by Huawei to be unmatched and offers 524 ExaFLOPS of FP8 performance. This surpasses the ZettaFLOPS mark for FP4.
Compute performance has been the bottleneck in China so far, and power consumption is not a major issue. However, Huawei heavily relies on its own optical interconnect solutions, which are known to be power-hungry. The company does not provide information on power consumption for the new chips.
In the following year, the SuperPoD with 64 Atlas 960 will be introduced, potentially quadrupling performance depending on the use case. This could surpass Nvidia's upcoming Rubin Ultra NVL576, which fits into a single rack, in the chosen parameters.
The new AI products are part of Huawei's ongoing efforts to compete with industry giants in the AI sector. The company has been using variants of the Ascend 910, which is several years old, but the new chips are expected to significantly improve performance and capabilities.
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