Huawei's Ascend 910C delivers 60% of Nvidia H100 inference performance
38 comments
·February 5, 2025seanmcdirmid
tmnvdb
SMIC makes the Ascend 910c using its N+2 process—basically TSMC’s 7nm equivalent—and ASML’s TWINSCAN NXT:2000i DUV immersion lithography machines. But with yields stuck around 20% late last year, it's far from commercial-grade. GlobalFoundries and Intel have also wrestled with yield issues on this node, so it's no walk in the park. Expect the Chinese government to keep funding it for a few more years, but by then, the tech might be a bit dated—TSMC's been producing 7nm chips commercially since 2018.
chvid
The yield is much higher as indicating by Huawei using their 7nm process in mid range phones and tablets for export. Bottle neck now is likely in high bandwidth memory.
rickdeckard
- The Kirin 9000s die used in Huawei's phones/tablets is 107 mm².
- SMIC's Ascend 910B has a die size of 665.61mm², which is more than 6x larger.
- The AI chiplet of Ascend 910 itself is already significantly larger than the whole Kirin 9000s die. There's no data on it from SMIC, but when TSMC produced it with equivalent N7+ process, it was 456.25mm² (>4x larger)
I don't know about the rumored 20% yield, but this difference in die-size alone would dramatically impact yield for the Ascend design. And that's just ONE factor.
SMIC could have achieved a 90% yield with Kirin 9000s and still be at 20% with Ascend 910...
re-thc
> as indicating by Huawei using their 7nm process in mid range phones and tablets for export
Does Huawei have a lot of options (considering the ban) to indicate this?
janmo
The H100 is sold around 25k USD, with a production cost of only around $3k USD according to estimates.
Also it is heavily export controlled meaning many countries can't get their hand on it.
So even with the 910C consuming more electricity and having lower yields there will certainly be a market for it.
chvid
It looks like it is happening.
You are also seeing falling prices on second hand NVIDIA chips (like the h800 and h100) and cloud hosting in China.
willvarfar
> This suggests that Huawei's AI processor's capabilities are advancing rapidly, despite sanctions by the U.S. government and the lack of access to leading-edge process technologies of TSMC.
So chipping away at Taiwan's "silicon shield" (the defence strategy that an attack on Taiwan would deny China of the chips it needs itself).
Soon China can have a security situation with Taiwan (doesn't really matter if it actually invades, or just has a hotting-up conflict with rocket exchange) to choke off supplies of high-end chips to the West whilst domestic alternatives ramp up?
noxs
China's territorial claims over Taiwan starts from 1949 since the civil war ends. [1]
The semiconductor doesn't play significant factor here. It only becomes hot topics in past few years because of TSMC's lead on its process, but really doesn't have any direct relationships.
In other words, current situation is a result of U.S. "Asia-Pacific Rebalance" strategy and military deployment over the first island chain [2] that China wanted the island regardless of TSMC.
null
vl
Since we just entered AGI arms-race, semiconductor industry has direct relation.
I think China will capture Taiwan in the next two years.
bgnn
That's definitely reading the situation totally wrong.
This so called arms race is only in western minds. It would be stupid to not think about this possibility and its consequences of course but this is the most illogical option by China.
The best option would be to advance their own semiconductor tech beyond TSMC and make it irrelevant, which so far is the course of action they are taking (alas only because they are forced by US).
Expanding on why capturing Taiwan is stupid: TSMC already has fabs and people with knowhow outside Taiwan. The fab assets are not as strategicly valuable as their knowhow. Plus, even if you acquire the knowhow, there's the supply chain: ASML, others, ASML's supply chain.
I think US might force ASML and TSMC to move to US in the coming years even stronger but more than that this arms race isn't getting hot.
suraci
there's no AGI arms-race in china
> He stressed that China will not blindly follow trends or engage in unrestrained international competition. With a robust governance and regulatory system in place, China is confident in its ability to manage and utilize AI technology effectively
https://www.geopolitechs.org/p/chinas-vice-premier-ding-xuex...
IIRC, this speech was given just after Stargate announced
willvarfar
Yes China wants Taiwan.
Taiwan has been touting it's "Silicon Shield" defence for years and trying to tie China's self-interest with leaving Taiwan alone for now.
But the Silicon Shield is tumbling.
On the one side the US (the carrots of the CHIPS act under Biden, the stick of sanctions on Taiwan under Trump) is trying get sovereign control of chip production.
And on the other side China is ramping up getting sovereign control of it's own top-end production.
If both stay on course then China will have one less big reason not to invade, and the US will have one big reason less to defend.
Of course if China wins the 'race' then it could be to it's advantage to have a rocket exchange or invasion with Taiwan to choke of the West's supply of chips before the West has brought chip production home?
noxs
I don't really think it will choke the supply, but only reduce in capacity in short term, for example TSMC Arizona[1] took 4 years to be in produciton. Intel's process is still acceptable and better than China.
Also semiconductor is very complicated manufacturing process not only invovles Taiwan but vendors all over the world, like the light source of EUV is provided by Cymer based in U.S. I don't think China taking over Taiwan would mean they can transfer whatever is there into something productive in any short time as because of supply chain problem. Note that many SMIC's (basically China's TSMC) leadership are actually from TSMC already[2].
[1]https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liang_Mong_Song
re-thc
> So chipping away at Taiwan's "silicon shield"
This assumes Taiwan's involvement in Huawei processors are 0. Lots of things don't make the news. There are way more companies involved than just TSMC.
fulafel
At the risk of whataboutism, this is looking a little differnet now on the world stage with the US-on-Denmark threats. A second source for AI hw from China could turn out to be a good card to have even for western countries.
killingtime74
Don't need China to choke off chips. Trump is doing that himself with tariffs
buyucu
This is great news. More competition will be good.
viraptor
The key piece of information is missing though - at what price and energy cost. For the first sample it sounds exciting, but... they'll have to compete with the cost of smuggling Nvidia into the country.
threatripper
Even if price and energy is 10x it will not slow down AI development much once the Chinese government starts pouring in big money.
DSingularity
Agree on price but what you are suggesting on energy is likely not true.
More energy is likely more power (if you decide that the performance matters). More power means you cant network enough of these chips together at the scales needed for training. And that means they havent really solved the problem (although likely they are progressing nicely towards the solution).
threatripper
Here they talk about the solutions developed in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1f-o0nqpEI
Basically they made training much more efficient and developed a better and cheaper product. They passed the stage of "AI in China is basically impossible" to "It's just a matter of time and money until they take the lead".
MangoCoffee
China has already dumped a lot of money into its semiconductor industry. Can China continue with its current economic decline?
bgnn
With artificially high Nvidia GPU costs it could very well be feasible.
thorncorona
It doesn't matter. Matters of national security don't get killed for economic reasons.
viraptor
It wouldn't get killed, but it may end up like Baikal, Elbrus and others - kept around just in case, but not really used instead of bought/smuggled chips.
threatripper
It always matters to some degree but you can spend much much more to get an edge for national security. 10x maybe 100x compared to the free market but not infinite.
ein0p
The US also has comparable hardware, and it had it for a while: Intel Gaudi. Similar perf characteristics, works very well for inference, costs substantially less than H100. The entire field seems to be drowning in money, so no one gives a shit.
im3w1l
Where is it sold?
lostmsu
It is not. Even the previous one is not mass produced and you can't buy it.
kome
why don't they use Loongson? are they also manufactured by Huawei?
logicchains
Loongson are CPUs, not GPUs.
lostmsu
No, it doesn't. Where are the flops/tops?
YetAnotherNick
It has around 1/4th of flops of H100[1], but it could still get 60% for inference if it has higher than half of memory bandwidth.
[1]: https://www1.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seem5730/l22/06%20Atlas%20AI%20...
lostmsu
Bandwidth bottleneck applies only to non-batched inference on single accelerator setups.
YetAnotherNick
Even for batched it applies if the batch size couldn't be super high due to memory size.
What about yields? Even if it is 600% faster but yields are 1000x worse, it doesn’t mean much commercially. But if this is an old chip that is easy to fab with equipment China has easy access to, then it is a big deal.