Since the conflict which became known in which Huawei was due to the trade war between China and the United States where the Chinese company would be blacklisted of companies in which it practically enters a commercial veto.
After that, Huawei acquired a 90-day permit which expired last August and then acquired another 90 days. Now in an article posted on your website, the company announced the launch of its Ascend 910 artificial intelligence processoras well as a new artificial intelligence framework, MindSpore.
Where processor specs had already been announced at its flagship event in 2018, Huawei Connect. The Ascend 910 is a new artificial intelligence processor that belongs to the company's Ascend-Max series.
After a year of development, the test results now show that the Ascend 910 processor achieves its performance targets with much lower power consumption than originally planned.
Along with this project, Huawei launched MindSpore, a development framework for artificial intelligence applications in all scenarios. The goal is to dramatically reduce training time and costs and use as few resources as possible.
According to the company, support for all scenarios is essential to enable secure and ubiquitous artificial intelligence. It is a key component of the framework MindSpore, which can be easily adapted to different implementation needs. In addition, MindSpore incorporates model protection technology that ensures the safety and reliability of the model.
The company also claims that in a typical neural network for natural language processing, MindSpore contains 20% fewer basic lines of code than market-leading frameworks and enables developers to increase their efficiency by at least 50%.
"Ascend 910 is performing much better than expected," said Eric Xu, president of Huawei. "It certainly has more computing power than any other artificial intelligence processor in the world."
RISC-V may be the alternative that Huawei is looking for
In addition, Huawei said it is planning to opt for RISC-V if the restrictions imposed by the United States government persist.
RISC-V is an open architecture, originally designed to support research and teaching in IT architecture and is now destined to become a standard open architecture for broader implementation in the industry. Huawei's launch schedule is currently not subject to any US ban, as the company is already licensed for ARMv8 architecture (ARM architectures are external RISC architectures).
Although ARM is a British company, some of its technologies are developed in the United States. Therefore, you must comply with the prohibition.
“If the new ARM technologies are not available in the future, we can also use RISC-V, an architecture open to all companies. The challenge is not insurmountable, "said Eric Xu, President of Huawei.
Huawei is already a member of the RISC-V Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting the use of smart architecture. However, the company also indicated that it had made no effort to migrate to RISC-V, preferring to continue using ARM.
In response to this news, Xiang Ligang, executive director of the Information Consumption Alliance, said that if Huawei really adopts the RISC-V architecture, it would be a great loss for ARM, given the size of Huawei. as the world's leading manufacturer of telecommunications equipment and the world's second-largest smartphone supplier.
The founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei believes that his company is playing everything for the bull in survival against the United States.
Since in an internal note sent to employees whose content was confirmed by Huawei, he explains that the group faces a crucial moment that will decide its life or death.
The Huawei founder also outlines the strategy he plans to implement and urges to include a massive investment in production equipment to avoid any disruption from suppliers. According to him, the company is also removing some hierarchical layers and removing inefficient posts.
And POWER, IBM has released the POWER architecture as open, and the first Chinese to implement it in mobiles and laptops, "will be covered" because they are more powerful than the current x86, and serve from mobile to supercomputer.
Power is open, but IBM is North American, I imagine that indirectly it is susceptible to being controlled by it. Then there is the "open", here I comment without knowing the Power data in this regard, the terms open, free, free, ... can mean different things depending on the country where they are used.
It would be a breath of fresh air to the market, the x86 architecture carries too much backward compatibility.