Chip comparison
Huawei Ascend 910B vs SambaNova SN40L
Side-by-side specs
Straight from each vendor's datasheet. Winner in bold: higher throughput, memory, or transistor count; lower power draw or price. Sparse (2:4) throughput roughly doubles the FP8/INT8 numbers shown.
| Field | Huawei Ascend 910B | SambaNova SN40L |
|---|---|---|
| Process node | SMIC N+2 (~7nm) | TSMC N5 |
| TDP | 400 W | 700 W |
| Memory | 64 GB HBM2e | 1500 GB DDR5 (three-tier: 64 MB SRAM + 64 GB HBM3 + 1.5 TB DDR5) |
| Memory bandwidth | 1,600 GB/s | — |
| FP16 (dense) | 400 TFLOPS | 638 TFLOPS |
| BF16 (dense) | 400 TFLOPS | — |
| FP8 (dense) | — | 1,250 TFLOPS |
| INT8 (dense) | 800 TOPS | — |
| Form factor | OAM (Atlas 300T A2) | PCIe (SN40L DataScale system) |
| Announced | 2023-08-01 | 2023-09-19 |
| Released | 2023-08-01 | 2024-01-01 |
Robots running Huawei Ascend 910B
Robots running SambaNova SN40L
No robots publicly running it yet.
Data centers with Huawei Ascend 910B
Data centers with SambaNova SN40L
No data centers publicly running it yet.
Common questions
Huawei Ascend 910B vs SambaNova SN40L: which is faster for training?
SambaNova SN40L has 3.13x the dense FP16/BF16 throughput of the other (Huawei Ascend 910B: 400 TFLOPS; SambaNova SN40L: 1,250 TFLOPS). Real-world training speed also depends on memory bandwidth, interconnect, and software stack: see the spec diff for those inputs.
Huawei Ascend 910B vs SambaNova SN40L: which has more memory?
SambaNova SN40L carries more HBM (Huawei Ascend 910B: 64 GB HBM2e; SambaNova SN40L: 1500 GB DDR5 (three-tier: 64 MB SRAM + 64 GB HBM3 + 1.5 TB DDR5)). Memory capacity sets the largest model that fits on one chip without partitioning; memory bandwidth sets inference throughput.
Huawei Ascend 910B vs SambaNova SN40L: which is more power-efficient?
Dense FP16/BF16 TFLOPS per watt: Huawei Ascend 910B 1.00 (400 ÷ 400 W); SambaNova SN40L 1.79 (1,250 ÷ 700 W). SambaNova SN40L wins at the die level; system-level efficiency also depends on cooling and interconnect.
Huawei Ascend 910B vs SambaNova SN40L: which is more widely used?
Huawei Ascend 910B: 2 robots and 1 data center publicly running it. SambaNova SN40L: 0 robots and 0 data centers. Empty here means no operator has said publicly, not zero adoption in the market.
See also: every chip comparison · Huawei Ascend 910B full page · SambaNova SN40L full page.