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 chip, codenamed the Ascend 960DT — the DT here apparently stands for decode/training — is slated to arrive a full three quarters ahead of schedule, launching in the first quarter of 2027. With up to 288 GB of what we assume is Huawei’s custom HiZQ memory tech, a homegrown alternative to the high-bandwidth memory used by the rest of the world, and up to four petaFLOPS of FP4 performance (half that at FP8), the...

Read the full article at the source.