Huawei announces first AI-soc for consumer products

Huawei has announced its first ‘AI-soc’, presumably for security cameras and possibly wearables. The manufacturer has given the name Ascend P310. Huawei has not released many details about the chip.

The Ascend P310 is intended for wearables with a screen, because it can decode and encode videos at maximum full-hd resolution. The soc seems moreover intended for security cameras. It is one of the few details Huawei has made known during the keynote at his own Connect event in homeland China.

The P310 has a tdp of 8W and Huawei makes it on a 12nm FinFet process. This is an older process compared to its latest soc for smartphones; the Kirin 980 is at 7nm. Over the architecture, Huawei wants to say that it is Da Vinci core, the name for a self-developed ARM microarchitecture. The ai-chips are intended for performing calculations in neural networks and support training of models on the device.

Other specs are missing. Besides the Ascend P310, Huawei also announced the Ascend 910. That is an ‘ai-chip’ for data centers. This is the first time Huawei has released details about its ai-chip series. The chips should appear in earbuds, smartphones and laptops. The name Ascend used Huawei for smartphones, such as the Ascend P7 and Mate 7 from 2014.