HiSilicon

HiSilicon Co., Ltd.
Native name
海思半导体有限公司；上海海思
TypeSubsidiary
IndustryFabless semiconductors, Semiconductors, Integrated circuit design
Founded18 October 2004
1991 Edit this on Wikidata
Headquarters
Shanghai Edit this on Wikidata
ProductsSoCs
Brands
  • Kirin Gigahom Kunpeng Balong Ascend
ParentHuawei
Lua error in Module:Infobox_multi-lingual_name at line 132: attempt to call field '_transl' (a nil value).

HiSilicon (Chinese: 海思; pinyin: Hǎisī) is a Chinese semiconductor company. It was[dubious – discuss] fully owned by Huawei.

HiSilicon buys licenses for CPU designs from ARM Holdings; Some of those are the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, ARM Cortex-M3, ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore, ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore, ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Cortex-A57 and also for their Mali graphics cores. HiSilicon has also purchased licenses from Vivante Corporation for their GC4000 graphics core.

Smartphones

Ascend 910C

Huawei Ascend 910C is expected to be (shipped or) mass shipped in May 2025; Ascend 910C combines two Ascend 910B processors. It (does much of the same, or) achieves performance similar to NVIDIA H100. NVIDIA H100 chips were banned from sale to China by US government in 2022.

DeepSeek researchers say Huawei Ascend 910C provides 60% of NVIDIA H100 inference performance.

DeepSeek R1 model (see DeepSeek), was trained on NVIDIA H800, but runs inference [or inference engines] on Ascend 910C.

In late April 2025 Huawei started delivering to customers CloudMatrix 384 - a cluster consisting of Ascend 910C chips. The system performs better than NVL72 (72 GB200 chips) from NVIDIA; However the power consumption is (much or) very much higher.

References

  1. ↑ HiSilicon Licenses ARM Technology for use in Innovative 3G/4G Base Station, Networking Infrastructure and Mobile Computing Applications Archived 27 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine, 2 August 2011 on ARM.com
  2. ↑ "HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd. 海思半导体有限公司". ARM Holdings. Archived from the original on 15 January 2013. Retrieved 26 April 2013.
  3. ↑ ARM Launches Cortex-A50 Series, the World's Most Energy-Efficient 64-bit Processors Archived 5 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine on ARM.com
  4. ↑ Lai, Richard (9 January 2013). "Huawei's HiSilicon K3V3 chipset due 2H 2013, to be based on Cortex-A15". Engadget. Archived from the original on 15 May 2013. Retrieved 26 April 2013.
  5. ↑ "Exclusive: Huawei readies new AI chip for mass shipment as China seeks Nvidia alternatives, sources say". www.reuters.com. Retrieved 26 April 2025.
  6. ↑ "DeepSeek research suggests Huawei's Ascend 910C delivers 60% of Nvidia H100 inference performance". www.tomshardware.com. 4 February 2025. Retrieved 26 April 2025.
  7. ↑ "Huawei chips are powering DeepSeek AI". www.gsmarena.com. Retrieved 26 April 2025.
  8. ↑ Lin, Liza; Huang, Raffaele (27 April 2025). "China's Huawei Develops New AI Chip, Seeking to Match Nvidia". www.wsj.com. Retrieved 27 April 2025.
  9. ↑ "Huawei delivers advanced AI chip 'cluster' to Chinese clients cut off from Nvidia". www.ft.com. Retrieved 30 April 2025.