A recent press release reports, “Huawei officially launched the world’s most powerful AI processor – the Ascend 910 – as well as an all-scenario AI computing framework, MindSpore… The Ascend 910 is a new AI processor that belongs to Huawei’s series of Ascend-Max chipsets. Huawei announced the processor’s planned specs at its 2018 flagship event, Huawei Connect. After a year of ongoing development, test results now show that the Ascend 910 processor delivers on its performance goals with much lower power consumption than originally planned. For half-precision floating point (FP16) operations, Ascend 910 delivers 256 TeraFLOPS. For integer precision calculations (INT8), it delivers 512 TeraOPS. Despite its unrivaled performance, Ascend 910’s max power consumption is only 310W, much lower than its planned specs (350W).”

The release continues, “Huawei also launched MindSpore today, an AI computing framework that supports development for AI applications in all scenarios. AI computing frameworks are critical to making AI application development easier, making AI applications more pervasive and accessible, and ensuring privacy protection. In 2018, Huawei announced the three development goals for its AI framework: (1) Easy development: Dramatically reduces training time and costs. (2) Efficient execution: Uses the least amount of resources with the highest possible OPS/W. (3) Adaptable to all scenarios: Including device, edge, and cloud applications. MindSpore marks significant progress towards these goals. As privacy protection grows more important than ever, support for all scenarios is essential for enabling secure, pervasive AI. This is a key component in the MindSpore framework, which can readily adapt to different deployment needs. Resource budget environments can be as large and complicated or small and simple as needed – MindSpore supports them all.”

Read more at huawei.com.

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