What’s the Ascend 910B AI chip Baidu ordered from Huawei?

Huawei reportedly won a big AI chip order from Baidu and started a conversation on its mysterious new AI chip with no public information.

In an exclusive report, Reuters revealed that China’s Baidu has placed AI chip orders for the Huawei “Ascend 910B” chip. As of today, we’ve not heard of this chipset because there are no official details available on its origin or specifications.

But this is a new product taking its root from the Ascend 910 AI processor, which was released in 2019. Interstingly, Huawei also shot down the website page for the Ascend 910 AI chip from the internet. However, we already covered its launch (here) from back then and there’s a lot that we can learn from Huawei’s first AI chip.

Huawei Ascend 910 AI chip is a 7nm processed chip with Huawei’s self-developed Da Vinci AI architecture. The Chinese company designed this architecture to provide customized AI task execution in each core of the chipset.

In terms of performance, Ascend 910 has been benchmarked on half-precision floating point (FP16) operations. It can deliver 256 TeraFlops and for integer precision calculations (INT8) it produces 512 TeraOPS. Ascend 910 has a max power consumption of 310W, which was planned at 350W maximum.

Eric Xu, Huawei’s Rotating Chairman said at that time that Ascend 910 performs “better than we expected”.

Meanwhile, some sources suggest that Huawei’s new chip is far better than its predecessor. Saying that the Ascend 910B is comparable to Nvidia’s A100 AI chipset. Despite all of the latest revelations, Huawei is keeping this new chip low, which is kind of similar treatment as the latest Kirin mobile processor for the Huawei Mate 60 Pro smartphone.

In August, Huawei unveiled this flagship with its self-developed chip but the company refrained from any official promotions or statements about this new chip, identified as Kirin 9000s.

Despite all the secrecy, Huawei is apparently making big moves in the background and gradually expanding into options that could bring rapid growth.