US efforts to curb China's advanced chip industries may be having an effect, amid claims that Huawei is struggling to ramp up production of its Ascend 910B accelerator. The news comes as China's president seeks to boost the country's confidence in key technologies including chips.
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Huawei's Ascend 910B is seen as China's answer to Nvidia's GPUs, the most powerful of which are banned from sale in the Middle Kingdom because Washington fears they could be used to develop AI for Beijing's military.
The chip is claimed to have performance on par with Nvidia's A100 GPU, and is believed to be a proprietary design manufactured by Chinese chipmaker SMIC using a 7nm process technology, unlike the older Ascend 910 product.
Not surprisingly, buyers in China were said to prefer Huawei's product to the special GPUs Nvidia makes for that market, whose performance is deliberately limited to meet export requirements.
