What kind of tests these are, unclear
Huawei claims its Ascend 910B processor could be faster than Nvidia A100.
Huawei's head of ICT infrastructure business management, Wang Tao, said that this one is on par with the Nvidia A100, if not better. In some tests, the Ascend 910B was found to provide 80% of the Nvidia A100's performance at training large language models, but «in some other tests, Ascend chips can outperform the A100 by 20%». < /p>
In what tests these are, Huawei decided not to specify, but the company still does not say that in all or many. According to Tao, there is «not much difference between the performance of the Ascend 910B and the Nvidia A100 when training large AI models».
Ascend 910B was introduced quite recently. It is produced using the 7 nm process technology at SMIC facilities, and something better is not yet available for Huawei. The specifications of the Ascend 910B are unknown, but the company released the Ascend 910 back in 2019. Similar names may indicate that the chips have a lot in common, but the latter offered only 512 TFLOPS of integer performance.