Huawei
Leak shows Huawei-SMIC Ascend 910B entirely differs from TSMC Ascend 910
Huawei and TSMC AI chip fight is taking an unusual turn with a new leak regarding Ascend 910B. A tech analyst has shared some images that hint the SMIC-made AI processor is entirely different from the one made in the TSMC foundry.
Kurnalsalts has recently shared the die shots of three AI processors: Ascend 910 (TSMC), Ascend 910B (SMIC), and an unknown Ascend 610 chip for AI applications.
Die shots refer to images of an integrated circuit’s layout that reveals its complete design. It shows the real circuit without any packaging or external layering.
These images reflect that Huawei Ascend 910B made by SMIC and Ascend 910 by TSMC are quite different. They might have some similarities but also contain notable differences. SMIC’s AI chip seems to have more and larger cores than 910 chip.
Both Ascend 910 and 910B rely on a multi-chiplet architecture. The major parameters of the Ascend 910 include Virtuvian AI SoC, Nimbus V3 I/O layout, four HBM2E memory stacks, and two dummy layouts to maintain the balance between SoCs.
TSMC has generated the original Virtuvian chiplet with N7 + fabrication process. It has a dimension of 14.6 x 31.25mm which makes the die size 456.25mm. sq.
Virtuvian has 32 DaVinci Max-AI cores that support INT8 and FP16 formats. All these components are set in four clusters and interlinked via a 1024-bit mesh network-on-chip (NoC) at 2GHz to provide 128GB/s bandwidth per core.
Other components count four 1024-bit HBM2 interfaces and five die-to-die interfaces connected with Nimbus and PCIe I/O. Now let’s explore Ascend 910B chip.
Leak shows Huawei-SMIC Ascend 910B entirely differs from TSMC Ascend 910 (Image Credits: Kurnalsalts/X)
SMIC-made Ascend 910B has a larger IC layout than the 910. It measures 21.32 x 31.22mm and has a die size of 665.61mm. sq. It has only 25 DaVinci AI cores. Although these are different from the TSMC’s AI chip. As per Kurnalsalts, the Ascend 910B uses New DaVinci AI cores.
The difference between New DaVinci cores and DaVinci Max is unknown. But the former seems eligible to run code, written for the original cores. Details further reveal that SMIC has used the N+1 fabrication process (7nm) to build the computing layout for the Ascend 910B AI processor.
The enhanced DaVinci cores might have increased the die size. Although it’s an unlikely scenario. Apart from these two chips, Kurnalsalts also showed the layout of Ascend 910 which has 16 general-purpose CPU cores, eight DaVinci Max cores, DaVinci mini cores, and a 192-bit LPDDR5 memory interface.