Nvidia · AMD · Huawei · China · U.S. · The Register
Huawei's next-gen Ascend NPUs could become China's best option
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960DT is set to arrive early, boasting performance far exceeding anything the West could offer the Middle Kingdom.
Key facts
- At 288 GB, memory capacity won’t change much from the 960-series, but Huawei claims it expects to boost memory bandwidth to 14.4 TB/s, which should benefit AI inference considerably
- Huawei says NPO allowed it to consolidate 48,000 800 Gbps optical pluggables into 5,500 of its Hi-One NPO units, cutting power consumption by 550 kilowatts and failure rates in half
- By 2029, Huawei expects to double performance again to 7.2 petaFLOPS FP8 and 28 petaFLOPS FP4 while boosting memory capacity to 384 GB and 38.4 TB/s of memory bandwidth
- For its upcoming 960-series accelerators, Huawei is going a similar route using near packaged optics (NPO) to scale its compute domain to as many as 4,096 chips capable of delivering up to 16
Summary
At its annual Connect conference, Huawei unveiled a new generation of AI accelerators that promise performance far beyond anything Nvidia can currently sell in the Middle Kingdom. If that weren’t enough, the chip, codenamed the Ascend 960DT, the DT here apparently stands for decode/training, is slated to arrive a full three quarters ahead of schedule, launching in the first quarter of 2027. With up to 288 GB of what they assume is Huawei’s custom HiZQ memory tech, a homegrown alternative to the high-bandwidth memory used by the rest of the world, and up to four petaFLOPS of FP4 performance (half that at FP8), the accelerator offers twice the performance and memory capacity of the company’s 950-series parts, launched earlier this year.