It is unrealistic to expect another organization, like Huawei, to displace Nvidia quickly, because it will take time and effort from both a hardware and software perspective, Forrester senior analyst Alvin Nguyen said Tuesday.
Nguyen was reacting to a published report in the Financial Times (FT), which indicated, “China’s efforts to match US computing power in artificial intelligence are being hampered by bug-ridden software, with customers of leading AI chipmaker Huawei complaining about performance issues and the difficulty of switching from Nvidia products.”
The article went on to say, “the Chinese technology giant has emerged as the frontrunner in the race to develop a domestic alternative to industry leader Nvidia, after Washington further tightened export controls on high-performance silicon last October.”
According to the report, Chinese AI groups are increasingly using Huawei’s Ascend series to run inference to generate responses to queries.
It goes on to state, “multiple industry insiders, including an AI engineer at a partner company, said the chips still lagged far behind Nvidia’s for the initial training of models. They blamed stability issues, slower inter-chip connectivity and inferior software developed by Huawei called Cann.”
Nguyen said via email, “the difficulties being reported today about Huawei’s software in its attempts to replace Nvidia are unsurprising: the software ecosystem that Nvidia has developed has been around for a long time (Cuda, introduced in 2006) and (it) continues to leverage this to their advantage.”
He went on to say, “Huawei using their customer service capabilities to work more closely with customers in using their chips will help them counter Nvidia’s advantage with their software ecosystem long-term.”
In addition, said Nguyen, “export controls will continue to give opportunities for Huawei to compete, since the export controls prevent Nvidia from selling the ‘best’ version of its products in China.”
In its report, FT stated that Huawei has been sending its engineers to customer sites to help them transfer their training code, written in Cuda, to Huawei’s Cann.
Thomas Randall, director of AI market research at Info-Tech Research Group, said “China is certainly trying to be self-sufficient in advanced chip manufacturing. However, Huawei is suffering yield setbacks in expanding production of its processing hardware, which was originally designed to substitute for Nvidia’s processors.”
Low yields for its processors, he said, “will mean that advanced chip-making will remain commercially unsustainable. This does not mean Huawei is down and out, as they have improved their market share in China — they are just under a continued time crunch to improve their competitiveness.”
And they’re pushing hard. On August 13, a Reuters article stated, “China’s Huawei Technologies is close to introducing a new chip for artificial intelligence use to challenge Nvidia in China amid US sanctions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing sources.” It said that Huawei was touting the Ascend 910C to potential customers, saying it is comparable to the Nvidia H100.
Source:: Network World