Amid US restrictions, research points to new opportunities for China’s most powerful AI chip

Huawei Technologies’ Ascend chip, China’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) processor, can outperform Nvidia’s flagship V100 chip in certain tasks, but also has some serious shortcomings, according to a new study by Chinese scientists.

The researchers evaluated the Ascend processor’s performance in various applications to gain the first in-depth look at China’s growing competence as well as weakness in AI chip technology.

Despite not being fully aligned with international flagship chips in overall performance, researchers said the Huawei Ascend processor could be used across most existing applications, and in some scenarios even surpass the performance of global competitors.

The evaluation, carried out by researchers at China’s Renmin University and Tsinghua University, was published in the peer-reviewed Chinese Journal of Computers in August, just before Washington banned US sales of the most powerful AI chips to China.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) were originally developed to render images in video games, but in the past decade they have been increasingly deployed in the largest supercomputers by scientists and internet companies. AI algorithms based on high-end GPUs can be used in autonomous driving, robotic manufacturing, real-time translation and medical image analysis.

AI algorithms have made impressive progress, but their applications are limited by the performance of hardware. To extend the performance of algorithms, companies in Silicon Valley, like Nvidia, have begun developing accelerator chips like the V100 to replace GPUs.