Huawei details AI accelerator roadmap, pulls in next-generation Ascend NPUs by several quarters — FP4 performance of the Ascend 960PR doubles expectations

Huawei has updated its AI hardware roadmap by adding new accelerators and supporting processors and pulling in next-generation Ascend 960 accelerators at its annual Huawei Connect event. Specifically, the company accelerated its Ascend 960 roadmap, disclosed Ascend 970 and 980 specifications, introduced its Peerium architecture based on the UnifiedBus, and expanded its vertically integrated AI infrastructure portfolio.Huawei is currently in the middle of transitioning from its SIMD architectures that it has used for almost a decade with its Ascend accelerators (or neural processing units, how the company prefers to call them) to its all-new SIMD+SIMT architectures that bring together vector-based processing and thread-level parallelism to improve hardware utilization and performance across a variety of AI workloads (SIMD for data parallel operations and SIMT for branch-heavy workloads).Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.