THE CRUNCH
Huawei has accelerated its Ascend AI accelerator roadmap, bringing the next-generation Ascend 960 series forward by several quarters and boosting its low-precision performance. The company revealed that the Ascend 960DT will launch in Q1 2027 with 2 FP8 and 4 FP4 PFLOPS, while the Ascend 960PR will follow in Q3 2027 with 2 FP8 and 8 FP4 PFLOPS. Huawei is also transitioning to a new SIMD+SIMT architecture and plans to
maintain a one-generation-per-year cadence, rolling out the Ascend 970 in 2028 and the Ascend 980 in 2029. The company noted that its current Ascend 950 platform is already in large-scale commercial use, though production capacity remains insufficient to meet domestic demand. Huawei's new architecture aims to improve hardware utilisation across a variety of AI workloads by combining vector-based processing with thread-level parallelism.