Huawei's next-gen Ascend NPUs could become China's best option

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. This could be a boon for Chinese developers used to purchasing lesser weapons from everyone's favorite AI arms dealer. If that weren’t enough, the …

[Pete 2]

What the hardware giveth, the software taketh away

One solution to slow hardware is to improve the efficiency of the software. This is something that the west, with it's predictably ever-rising performance numbers seems to avoid. Presumably because the cost of a software developer is still higher than the cost of this year's latest hardware.

But when the option of just waiting for chips to catch up with the demands of the application, does not exist then focusing on more bang per petaFLOPS becomes the only alternative.

What should worry western suppliers is that when your competitor is both making the software work harder and catching up on hardware performance, it will be a scramble to stop them blowing past, waving as you eat their dust.

So yes, China is behind at present. But for how long? The history of every time there has been an East / West competition for developing products at scale, shows that the west starts out in front but gets overtaken. Should we hope that Chinese AIs speak English?

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

When the loads have to be run in parallel across huge clusters of servers to handle the internet user and agent workloads in the first place, the individual power of any one of those nodes in the cluster is almost completely irrelevant unless there is a physical limit on how many nodes you can deploy for some reason. Kudos to the Chinese and Huawei for insisting on doing what "the west" (the Americans) think they can't/shouldn't/aren't-allowed-to do. Scalability of node counts is the salvation of many a web cluster...