Huawei, which is at the cusp of public opinion, has attracted much attention from the outside world.
At the 2023 World Computing Conference held on September 15, Xu Zhijun, Vice Chairman and Rotating Chairman of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., revealed the latest progress of Huawei's computing strategy and his judgment on the development direction of China's AI computing industry ecosystem.
Xu Zhijun said that China's computing industry is moving forward under continuous pressure from design tools, materials, manufacturing equipment to chip products.
"Let's not have illusions, we should unswervingly build a sustainable computing industry ecology." Xu Zhijun believes that from the perspective of the development path of the computing industry, only large-scale use can drive the progress and development of the computing industry, and computing chips should be built on the basis of the actual available chip manufacturing process, and the computing power infrastructure should be built on the basis of sustainably obtained computing chips and ecology.
"At present, China's general computing industry is advancing in three ecological forms. One is the X86 ecosystem, one is the Pengteng ecosystem, and the other is the RISC-V open source ecosystem, the three ecosystems will develop in parallel for a long time in the future, and ultimately see who can support us to face the future. Xu Zhijun said.
According to public information, since Huawei officially announced its computing industry strategy in 2019, the "Kunpeng + Ascend" product portfolio has been regarded as a "challenger" to the rules of the industry.
In the face of the future ecosystem structure, Huawei has two tough battles to fight, one is the Hongmeng ecosystem for the consumer side and the Internet of Things, and the other is the "Kunpeng + Ascend" combination for the computing industry. At the above meeting, Xu Zhijun revealed that Huawei is accelerating with China Electronics to merge the Kunpeng ecosystem and PKS ecosystem into the Pengteng ecosystem, and launch a series of software support policies around it to improve the development of the ecosystem.
What are the challenges facing the computing industry?
What does the computing industry involve? For this problem, Xu Zhijun said that all computer-related can be included in the computing industry, but the most difficult to solve or must be comprehensively broken through is to return to the origin of computers.
In his view, the computing industry includes PCs, servers, operating systems, databases, as well as the processors, memory sticks, SSDs, HDDs, network cards, RAID cards, SSD controllers, network card chips, RAID card chips that make up PCs, servers, and these are the most important problems to be solved. "We couldn't even make network card chips and RAID card cores before, and we couldn't make power management chips for a computer server, so we have to return to the basic field of the computing industry."
Xu Zhijun believes that if China wants to develop its own processors, operating systems and databases, if they are all third-party, the outside world may obtain information on PCs and servers through its backdoors and vulnerabilities, and may also be used as an attack vector to attack other servers and PCs. "If our opponent is at the level of a doctor, and we are still at the elementary school level despite being a domestic thing, it is quite simple to attack and steal information." Xu Zhijun said that localization does not equal security, and only by improving capabilities can we truly have the ability to be safe.
"More than 600 Chinese entities are already on the U.S. government's Entity List." Xu Zhijun said that it covers chips, hardware, software, algorithms and applications. At the same time, everything from design tools and materials to manufacturing equipment and chip products have been affected by export controls.
"In this case, a real problem is that we have a lot of challenges in the long term. On the one hand, China's semiconductor manufacturing process will be lagging behind and catching up for a long time, and Huawei believes that this (state) will last for a long time, because only advanced processes can produce more advanced chips. On the other hand, U.S. export controls make access to advanced chips or advanced computing systems challenging, or impossible. From our experience over the years and judgment of the future, this is long-term. Xu Zhijun said that there should be no illusions about the future.
The development path of China's computing industry
"Although we produce chips, servers, PCs, compared with foreign production, there is a gap. But if it is not used, this gap will always be a gap, and backwardness will always be backwardness. But if we use it on a large scale, it may pull and promote the progress of our entire technology, the progress of our products, and then slowly catch up. Xu Zhijun said that only large-scale use is it possible to drive the progress and development of the entire computing industry, drive the progress of CPU, pull the progress of servers based on CPU, and drive the progress of the entire industry on this basis.
Since the future is unpredictable, all chips around the computing industry should be built on the available semiconductor manufacturing field, which is only then sustainable. "We don't rule out that access to advanced technology now can continue, but the old bottom must be kept." Xu Zhijun believes that unswervingly building a computing ecology can achieve sustainable growth through ecological prosperity.
"At present, there are three ecosystems of China's general computing industry moving forward. One is the X86 ecology, mainly derived from American technology, one is our Pengteng ecology, and the other is the RISC-V ecology based on open source, if it can be built, it is also a future-oriented ecology. These three ecosystems may develop in parallel for a long time, and ultimately it will be up to us to see who can sustain us for the future. Xu Zhijun said.
In the above speech, he also mentioned the Ascend ecosystem, which is Huawei's computing ecosystem based on its own AI processors.
Xu Zhijun said that Huawei began to build Ascend processors in 2017, and based on this ecosystem, as long as the chip can be produced, it can continue to develop. He believes that any large model, whether it is AI, must be continuously trained, and if it is developed based on a sustainable future-oriented ecology earlier, the higher the investment efficiency and the more future.
"It is not impossible to support the fundamental foundation and sustainable development of the country's computing power, and even lead." Affected by the semiconductor production process, the computing power of a single chip may not be enough, but based on integrated technology, multiple CPUs and multiple AI processors are connected to make a cluster, and then the distributed means of cloud computing can meet the national computing power needs. To sum up, we want to build China's tertiary industry. Xu Zhijun said that taking clusters and cloud services as the main direction of computing power infrastructure is one of the solutions.
Finally, Xu Zhijun called for in his speech that in addition to the current hot AI direction, universities should increase their efforts in the talent training of key processors, operating systems, and databases, and activate the open source ecosystem through some measures in policy.