Tech war: Huawei to open-source AI chip toolkit to take on Nvidia's proprietary platform
Eric Xu Zhijun said on Tuesday at the company's developer conference in
Beijing
Huawei has already discussed with China's leading artificial intelligence players, business partners, universities and research institutions how to build an open-source Ascend ecosystem, according to a statement from the company.
While the statement did not mention Nvidia's
proprietary Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) toolkit , Huawei's latest open-source initiative bolsters mainland China's broad push for technology self-sufficiency, while creating an alternative platform that developers can use to build applications on domestic AI chips.
The open-source approach gives public access to a programme's source code, allowing third-party software developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities.
Nvidia last year added a provision to its CUDA licence agreement, requiring developers
not to run CUDA on third-party graphics processing units (GPUs) using so-called translation layers – software that converts one set of codes into another – on non-Nvidia hardware systems.
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