It's another year for the Huawei Full Connect Conference. In the past two days, various screens have been screened. If you don't look closely, you will feel that it is similar to previous years. New products, new technologies, new solutions, and new ecological plans are available every year. However, it’s not right to look back carefully. This year’s weather vane has completely changed. Huawei talks about Kunpeng + Shengteng, various open sources... Computing has become the main element of this year's Full Connect Conference.
Pursuit : To provide the world with the strongest computing power, to make the cloud everywhere, and to make intelligence omnipresent.
Path : Create an industrial layout of "one cloud, two wings, dual engines" and build an open industrial ecology.
Among them, the dual engine refers to the two basic chip families built around "Kunpeng" and "Shengteng" to build a heterogeneous computing architecture.
The two wings refer to intelligent computing services and intelligent data and storage services. In the field of intelligent computing, it provides diversified computing power of "Kunpeng + Shengteng + x86 + GPU" for the end, edge and cloud. In the field of intelligent data and storage, it integrates storage, big data, database, and AI, and focuses on the entire life cycle of data to optimize the cost per bit of data and maximize the value of data per bit.
One cloud refers to HUAWEI CLOUD. Through full-stack innovation, it provides a safe and reliable hybrid cloud, becoming a black land of ecological partners and providing inclusive computing power to the world.
An open ecology refers to the formation of an open industrial ecology by enabling a wide range of partners through open hardware and open software.
Among the logic, dual engines are the core technology, the two wings are application scenarios, one cloud is both a practical field and a window for external computing power, and an open ecosystem is a connector. There is no doubt that this is a complete commercial closed loop, and the key depends on the progress.
Next, we will discuss the feasibility of Huawei's new computing strategy.
What is the key to success? There are nothing more than two points, to follow the trend and keep up with the general trend of diversified computing power; explore the path of open ecology.
Shouldn't you not answer first, and see what the momentum is? Currently, the computing industry is showing four major trends.
1. From data center to computing center. The main function of the data center in the future is to calculate, and the required computing power rises linearly. According to statistics, the demand for AI computing power has increased by more than 10 times each year. It is estimated that by 2025, AI computing power will account for more than 80% of data center computing power. Data centers are gradually evolving into computing centers.
2. End and side are driving innovation in computing architecture. At present, the ARM architecture chips are more commonly used by devices and edges, and the cloud is more of an x86 architecture. Mobile applications based on the ARM architecture are migrated to the cloud, and the performance loss is about 40%, which not only affects the user experience, but also increases the migration cost. More importantly, the use of chips on the end and side far exceeds that of the cloud, which means that the former will dominate and lead the development of the ecology, and then drive the innovation of the center-side computing architecture.
3. The calculation should be energy and environment friendly. At the same time as the computing power increases, the energy consumption can not increase or increase less, which seems like a paradox, but it can be done in practice. Taking the Atlas 900 AI training cluster released by Huawei as an example, the computing power reached 256 PFLOPS. To achieve this kind of computing power, if a general-purpose CPU is used, 6195 cabinets are required, and a GPU requires 208 cabinets, while NPU such as Shengteng only needs 128 cabinets. However, in fact, Huawei only used 16 cabinets in the end, because in addition to chip optimization, it also added system-level optimizations, such as board-level liquid cooling and cabinet-level airtight insulation. The computing power increases, and the power consumption decreases instead of increasing. It is environmentally friendly and saves costs.
4. Continuous innovation of computing architecture. The slowdown of Moore's Law has become a reality, but the computing power has actually been continuously improving over the years. Thanks to the continuous innovation of the architecture, it is a fact that the computing architecture is blooming.
Obviously, the general trend is that society needs ample, high-performance, diverse, green, and within reach of computing power. In fact, this is what Huawei is committed to providing to the world.
Under the wind, there are countless players. If you can't walk to get the last, you have to talk about products and data. Simply list a few comparison parameters:
Kunpeng includes server and PC chips. Kunpeng 920 is the industry’s first 64-core data center processor. Its performance is 25% higher than the industry’s mainstream processors and its memory bandwidth is 60% higher. It also integrates CPU, bridge, network and disk controllers. "4-in-1" is the most integrated data center processor in the industry.
Shengteng includes training and inference chips. The Shengteng 910 used for training has a half-precision (FP16) computing power of 256 TFLOPS, which is twice the industry's. The Shengteng 310 for reasoning has an integer (INT8) computing power of 16 TOPS and a power consumption of only 8W.
The Atlas900, developed based on the Shengteng 910 processor, ranked first in the world with 59.8 seconds in the ResNet-50 test, and was 15% faster than the second place under the same accuracy.
The Huawei Cloud Kunpeng cloud service based on the Kunpeng processor increases the overall performance by 80% in the native application scenario; in the big data scenario, the task processing time is reduced by 35%.
Not only the chip itself is strong, but the system based on the chip is equally strong. Perhaps many people have heard Huawei talk about its own chips frequently in the past two years. As everyone knows, Huawei has been silently researching and developing for this day for more than ten years. In 2004, Huawei began to invest in the research and development of the first embedded processing chip, and currently invests more than 20,000 engineers.
In principle, following the general trend, coupled with good products, ecological construction is only a matter of time. However, Huawei obviously does not want to take this process too long, so it has taken a series of major measures.
Open Kunpeng motherboard interface specifications and equipment management specifications , provide complete machine reference design guidelines, and fully open Huawei's technical accumulation and practical experience to partners. Partners can quickly develop their own-brand server and desktop products based on the Kunpeng motherboard and the reference design guide for the whole machine.
The open-source server operating system , the name of the open-source version is openEuler, supports partners to release openEuler-based commercial versions, and supports the migration of mainstream applications and software in various industries to openEuler-based operating systems.
The open source GaussDB OLTP stand-alone database , the open source version is called openGauss, and will be fully launched in June 2020. It can cover more than 70% of the enterprise's database business scenarios and support partners to develop their own branded database products and applications.
This is tantamount to relinquishing market space to partners. Huawei’s attitude is very clear. What is missing Huawei will do first, everyone will use it first, first establish a complete ecosystem, and then continue to enrich and improve.
More importantly, Huawei not only opens up open source software and hardware products, but also promises. Huawei has made it clear that when conditions are ripe, it can stop selling TaiShan servers. In other words, Huawei will continue to enable partners to promote ecological maturity.
Specifically, Huawei will work hard in four areas in the next step:
Aggregate application by industry: Centering on various industries, unite industry partners to create a complete industrial ecological chain and competitive solutions.
Integrate industries by region: Outstanding branches are not spring, and spring is full of flowers. Huawei focuses on the development of processors and components. The Kunpeng industry is shared by the industry. Partners in all regions are welcome to build their own Kunpeng industry based on their own characteristics.
Incubating standards with alliances: In conjunction with organizations such as the Green Computing Industry Alliance and the Edge Computing Industry Alliance, develop an open software and hardware standard system to promote the healthy development of the industry.
Develop developers in communities: Developers are the soul of the industry. In the next five years, we will unite communities and universities to train 5 million developers to inject vitality into the computing industry.
In the next five years, Huawei plans to invest 1.5 billion US dollars in the development of the industrial ecosystem.
Therefore, returning to the question of whether Huawei can succeed, the most important thing depends on the speed of ecological construction.
To summarize the full text, it should be said that this is another major strategic turn for Huawei. After all, the core work of positioning chip providers and solution providers is different. It is foreseeable that the advancement of this business will require more motivation. As the new computing strategy continues to advance, Huawei will also have to make more adjustments and trade-offs. But it must also be said that Huawei will definitely succeed, regardless of national sentiments, because it has such a background, as well as sufficient precipitation and accumulation.