Huawei Unveils Kirin 970 AI Computing Platform

[Guest]

Huawei CEO Richard Yu announced the company’s new Kirin 970 SoC (system on a chip) with built-in AI capabilities at IFA, Europe's biggest tech show held each year in Berlin.

Huawei Unveils Kirin 970 AI Computing Platform : Read more

 

[Josh_killaknott27]

Same Company that is State owned by the CCP, im sure it was based of previously stolen Intellectual property. Toms, maybe do an article on Chinas cyber espionage.

 

[bit_user]

this new chipset can perform AI computing tasks up to 25x faster with 50x greater efficiency than a quad-core Cortex-A73 CPU alone.

Silly comparison ...but of course they all do that to make their new tech sound more impressive. The A73 only has 128-bit vector units - the real compute horsepower is in the GPUs, which is what people traditionally use for accelerating neural network processing.

Anyway, Qualcomm's SoCs feature a multi-core DSP block that is among the resources harnessed by their Zeroth software to accelerate neural processing. So, it's not a dedicated hardware block, but rather a multi-purpose engine that can also help with other tasks.

It'd be nice if everyone would support a benchmark like DeepBench, so we could make meaningful comparisons. Right now, we're still in the hype phase.

 

[bit_user]

Same Company that is State owned by the CCP, im sure it was based of previously stolen Intellectual property.

It's not an unwarranted accusation (Huawei's routers ran a stolen copy of Cisco's IOS, at one time), but most deep learning hardware isn't as exotic as it sounds. I'd have no problem believing it's entirely homegrown.

Remember, US tech companies have outsourced chip layout and design to China for more than a decade. Plenty of time to help develop their domestic workforce. Plus, their government has been pouring money into their universities and semiconductor industry.

Anyway, what actually worries me most about the domination of Chinese SoCs is the potential for their government to plant backdoors. Primarily, for spying on their own citizens. But, once the backdoors are there, they can also find other uses.

 

[Icehearted]

Did anyone else see smiling clown lips, or was that just me?