Huawei’s latest innovation in the world of AI chips, the Ascend 910C, is on the verge of making its debut. With the chip now officially in production, we’re beginning to see what it brings to the table.
Anticipating Huawei’s Ascend 910C: A Closer Look at Its Features and Impact
There’s no denying it—the Chinese AI industry is undergoing a massive technological revolution. The release of models such as DeepSeek’s R1 has led to a booming demand for greater computational power. Amongst Chinese AI chip manufacturers, Huawei has managed to carve out a distinct position. The forthcoming Ascend 910C is poised to turn up the heat in an increasingly competitive market. According to @ohlennart, who delves into the details of this new chip, it’s becoming apparent that Huawei’s latest could offer serious competition to NVIDIA’s H100 within China.
As per the insights shared on social media and drawing from our own sources, the Ascend 910C doesn’t match the complexity seen in NVIDIA’s designs. Instead, Huawei is opting for a dual silicon interposer setup connected via an organic substrate, sticking to more traditional design principles. Essentially, it combines two Ascend 910B chips to boost performance, pushing towards 800 TFLOP/s at FP16 and achieving memory bandwidths up to 3.2 TB/s—numbers that come tantalizingly close to matching the H100.
The technology behind the 910C relies on the 7nm process from both TSMC and SMIC. Prior to export restrictions, Huawei placed significant 7nm orders with TSMC, ensuring a substantial portion of Ascend 910C chips benefit from these orders. Meanwhile, China’s domestic firm SMIC steps in to contribute, having made strides in 7nm with an output reaching around 50,000 wafers monthly—a crucial factor if Huawei aims to dispatch "millions" of AI chips.
Considering China’s achievements in AI computing, the Ascend 910C marks a significant milestone. Globally, Huawei might still lag behind by a factor of 10 to 20 in terms of raw processing power. Yet, companies like DeepSeek demonstrate that there are ways to offset the lack of sheer power. With a wealth of talent in China, the AI competition is gearing up to be more intense than ever before.
