Huawei has recently launched the Ascend 910 – the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence processor yet, along with an all-scenario AI computing framework known as MindSpore.
Eric Xu, Huawei’s Rotating Chairman, said, ‘We have been making steady progress since we announced our AI strategy in October last year. Everything is moving forward according to plan, from R&D to product launch. We promised a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio. And today we delivered, with the release of Ascend 910 and MindSpore. This also marks a new stage in Huawei’s AI strategy.’
The Ascend 910 is delivering on its performance goals with much lower power consumption as opposed to what was originally planned. It delivers 256 TeraFLOPS for half-precision floating-point (FP16) operations, and 512 TeraOPS for integer precision (INT8). It can achieve all of this with a maximum power consumption of 310W as opposed to the planned 350W. Xu said, ‘Ascend 910 performs much better than we expected. Without a doubt, it has more computing power than any other AI processor in the world.’
At the same time, MindSpore – AI computing framework by Huawei – is offering easy development along with adaptability to all scenarios and efficient execution. The framework is necessary for providing secure and pervasive AI. MindSpore helps in ensuring user privacy by only works with gradient and model information that has already been processed. MindSpore also has 20% fewer lines of core code when compared with the leading frameworks available in the market, thus enabling its developers to raise their efficiency by as much as 50%.
Xu said, ‘MindSpore will go open source in the first quarter of 2020. We want to drive broader AI adoption and help developers do what they do best.’ AI portfolio of Huawei encompasses all deployment scenarios and is full-stack. It features the Ascend IP and chip series, chip enablement layer CANN, training and inference framework MindSpore, and application enablement platform known as ModelArts.
The new AI strategy by Huawei has been designed to close the gaps that can be a hurdle in the way of AI becoming a true general-purpose technology. Huawei is on its way to achieving its AI goals with the launch of Ascend 910 and Mindspore. Xu said, ‘Everything is moving forward according to plan. We promised a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio. And today we delivered.’