Huawei’s challenge to Nvidia’s AI dominance weakened by software issues

But, Forrester senior analyst Alvin Nguyen said Tuesday, it is unrealistic to expect another organization like Huawei to displace Nvidia quickly, because it will take time and effort from both a hardware and software perspective.

“The difficulties being reported today about Huawei’s software in its attempts to replace Nvidia are unsurprising: The software ecosystem that Nvidia has developed has been around for a long time,” Nguyen said via email. Nvidia introduced CUDA, its software platform for programming GPUs, in 2006.

One researcher told the FT that Huawei’s code made its Ascend chips “difficult and unstable to use,” hampering testing.

“When random errors occur, it is very difficult to find out where it comes from due to poor documentation. You need talented developers to read the source code to see what the issue is, which slows everything down. The coding is imperfect,” the researcher told the FT.

A Chinese engineer with knowledge of Baidu’s use of Huawei’s chips said they crashed frequently, the FT reported.

In its report, the FT said that Huawei has been sending its engineers to customer sites to help them transfer their training code written for Nvidia’s CUDA to Huawei’s CANN.