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  • Category: Tech

Huawei Ascend is a series of AI processors developed by Huawei, designed to power artificial intelligence across a wide range of scenarios. The series is built on Huawei's proprietary Da Vinci architecture and forms the foundation of the company's full-stack AI solution.

Core Products and Architecture

The Ascend series includes several key processors designed for different AI workloads, from edge computing to data centers.

  • Ascend 310: Launched in 2018, this chip is designed for low-power, edge computing scenarios. It delivers 16 TOPS of INT8 performance with an 8W power consumption.
  • Ascend 910: Released in 2019 for high-performance training in data centers. It achieves 256 TFLOPS of FP16 computing power.
  • Future Roadmap: Huawei has announced an ambitious roadmap to release new Ascend chips annually. This includes the Ascend 950 series expected in 2026, followed by the Ascend 960 in 2027 and Ascend 970 in 2028. These new generations will feature Huawei's self-developed High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), HiBL, to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers.

Hardware and Software Ecosystem

Beyond the chips themselves, Huawei offers the Atlas computing platform, which includes modules, accelerator cards, edge stations, servers, and clusters. This provides a complete AI infrastructure for deployment across "device, edge, and cloud" environments.

The software ecosystem is a critical component. Ascend supports popular AI frameworks like PyTorch through deep community collaboration. It is also supported by CANN (Compute Architecture for Neural Networks), Huawei's open-source heterogeneous computing architecture, and MindSpore, its native deep learning framework.

Applications and Ecosystem Development

Ascend's technology is applied across various industries through partnerships and tailored solutions:

  • Industry Solutions: The Ascend platform is used in sectors like smart cities, autonomous driving, finance, energy, and healthcare. For example, it supports large language model (LLM) training and inference, AI for content moderation, and computer vision tasks for security and manufacturing.
  • Developer Ecosystem: By 2025, the Ascend ecosystem had attracted over 6.65 million developers and more than 8,800 partners. Huawei is actively open-sourcing core software components and investing in computing power and development boards to build the ecosystem globally.

In summary, Huawei Ascend represents a comprehensive and rapidly evolving AI computing platform that aims to be a fundamental pillar for industrial AI applications and China's goal of technological self-sufficiency.