Eric Xu0:19
Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Awaken now in the beautiful autumn, this year we are gathered again at the Shanghai Expo Exhibition and Convention Center for our annual conference. This morning, I went through the stadium very early on my way here. I noticed that there is more traffic than previous years, and so I have to thank all of you. This is an extraordinary moment. Thank you for your support.
Yesterday when I was at a meeting, a lot of friends that I generally don't see, they asked me, 'Are you okay? Are you doing okay?' I think that it's a little heartwarming, their questions. For the past six months, Huawei has been put under pressure, and thank you. I'd like to give you an update. I think that we are doing fine. I don't think I need to say much, you can see just the weather. We are very lucky in Shanghai, so autumn blue skies. You know what I saw this year? You might be wondering, is this the same Huawei? There is that because of your support, that is why we're able to handle the challenges we're faced with. And it's because of your support that we're able to move forward. And I can guarantee you, we will not disappoint.
Two years ago, we announced our new vision, which is to bring digital to every person, home, and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. And now we believe there are two key technologies that we should continue to invest in and innovate in. And these two key technologies are connectivity and computing. As I said, in the industry, you know of Huawei as a company because of connectivity. It's true that we have made significant investments in connectivity for the past three decades, and we have made quite a lot of achievements. However, we are not a company that just does business in connectivity. We believe that connectivity and computing are equally important for us to build an intelligent world. Computing and connectivity are the two key technologies. They are inseparable, they are mutually enforcing, and they move forward step by step. Setting the stage, wherever there is a connection, you will have computing, and wherever there is computing, you have connections as well.
In fact, we have been investing in computing for 10 years, and you must have heard of our achievements in computing. And today, when we're moving into the future, we become more acutely aware of the fact that computing is a technology that we should invest in. And I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of our thoughts. On behalf of Huawei, I would like to give you a systematic review of our computing strategy. To start with, I will share with you some of our observations. In 1946, the first computer was invented. It's been over 70 years. Computers have become smaller and smaller, from mainframe computers to PCs, from desktops to laptops, tablets to smartphones, and wearables. They're becoming smaller and smaller, however, more and more powerful. More importantly, computers have become an extension of human beings, and we see boundless potential in the future of computing as an industry. With this, we believe more powerful computing is going to be one of the most important driving forces for enhancing human capacity.
We have also observed the changes in computing models. I majored in science and engineering subjects, and when I was in university, I got to use computers. Then, when I was learning programming, the teacher told us that a computer was a crystal-clear machine. Once you throw an equation at it, it will return a result for you. It was rule-based computing. In that model, it has facilitated a lot of domains. It can be programming, crunching results for formulas, census data analysis, to ballistic analysis. But now, as things change and evolve, the rule-based computing is no longer sufficient. For example, when it comes to image recognition, voice recognition, and such problems, they don't have crystal-clear rules behind them. Even if you can't define clear rules, scientists have come up with a solution, which is called the statistical computing model. Statistical computing can help us address the problems that are not definable with clear rules. Statistical computing has laid down the foundation for artificial intelligence. This is a reason why AI is able to see many breakthroughs. Let me have a bold forecast: I think this statistical computing is going to become mainstream, and we estimate that five years from now, statistical computing will consume computing power as much as 80% of the total computing power that we use around us in the future.
With these trends in mind, we've got good reason to believe computing is now entering into the new intelligent world. So in this intelligent computing world, we think that we must pay attention to several key defining features. First, in this new age, there will be a heavy reliance on computing power. Statistical computing itself is essentially a brute-force computing. It's got a heavy reliance on computing power. To give you one example, if you would like to teach a computer to recognize a cat, you have to train it by feeding it well over 1 million images. And this kind of training is power-hungry. And needless to say, astronomical exploration and weather forecasts and such are just going to consume more computing power. Second, computing will be ubiquitous because intelligence will be ubiquitous. We don't think that computing is only constrained to the central nodes. There was a view that computing would be all on the cloud, but we don't think such a view is the whole picture, because computing is not constrained to the central nodes. In the intelligent computing age, the central node will have powerful computing, on the edge we have specialized edge computing, for example, the one used for genome sequencing, and we'll also have computing on the device, reflecting individual needs. When you use your smartphones, your wearables, and your smart glasses, or even your smart earphones, they will be equipped with computing capabilities. So that from central to edge to device, computing will be everywhere. We think that ubiquitous computing will be a new feature for the intelligent computing era. With that in mind, we need a better cloud-edge-device cooperation. We believe the most ideal way to cooperate between these three is at the center, you've got brute-force computing to train the general-purpose model. The general-purpose model can better support the computing on the edge and on the device. If computing on these three can coordinate with each other, you can have optimal computing efficiency and superior user experience. In this case, you don't have to upload all your personal data to the cloud. So in a sense, it provides for better privacy protection. For the data you don't want to upload to the cloud, you can process it on the device.
When we are faced with such defining features, we believe that the industry has a lot to overcome. For example, the computing architecture, the supply of computing power and servers for different scenarios, processors for different scenarios, and even better connectivity. Huawei believes that when we're faced with the challenges, there are always more opportunities. The bigger the challenge is, the bigger the opportunity is. We believe in the coming 10 years, we will see a decade of golden era for the computing industry. Despite the challenges and difficulties we have faced, we are in a new blue-ocean market. And this is data from IDC. We believe that within five years, the computing sector may reach a two-trillion US dollar market. Based upon this prediction, Huawei will firmly invest in the computing sector. And next, I'd like to share with you Huawei's computing strategy.
Huawei's strategy in the computing sector consists of four parts: architecture innovation, investment in processors, sticking to the strategy of doing certain areas and choosing not to do certain areas, and an open ecosystem. So first, I'd like to talk about innovation in architecture. Maybe you know that Huawei has already launched the Da Vinci computing architecture. Why did we choose to do so? Based upon the insights that I have presented, when intelligence is pervasive and when computing is everywhere, computing power will become a critical resource or bottleneck. Well, today in the whole industry, computing power is already very scarce. Computing power is highly dependent on the efficiency of processors. As Moore's Law has almost reached its limit, the whole industry is in urgent need of a new architecture in order to find more computing power. And this is a demand of the whole industry. From Huawei's business strategy perspective, we have device business, network business, and also cloud services. Huawei itself needs a new architecture in order to cover device, edge, cloud, all scenarios. With this background, it is very natural for Huawei to develop the Da Vinci architecture. And it is the only architecture that can cover all the scenarios, including device, cloud, and edge. And this is the foundation for us to build an intelligent industry.
Huawei is also fully aware that we needed to provide more competitive processors so we will have core competitiveness. You can see that Huawei has already launched processor series for different scenarios. For example, for general-purpose computing, we have launched Kunpeng processors. And we have Ascend series for AI, and Kirin series for smart devices. And also, we have launched Honghu processors for smarter screens. In the future, we will launch more series of processors to cover a wider range of scenarios. Regarding our strategy, business strategy in the computing sector, the key question when it comes to business strategy is what is the business boundary? What we choose to do and what we choose not to do. So first of all, Huawei has no plan to sell processors independently. So what we will do, we will provide cloud services to our customers, and also we will provide some components like cards and boards to our partners. We'd like to support our partners to produce finished goods and full equipment. And there are three key figures. The first one is hardware opening. We will make our server mainboard, AI modules, and cards available to our partners, so our partners can develop finished goods and solutions. And second, we will make our software available through open source. The server OS, database, and AI development frameworks will be available through open source. Our partners can use the open-source versions to develop commercial versions, making software development easier. And third, Huawei has no plan to develop applications, but we will provide the tools and teams to help our partners to develop applications and migrate their applications. These are our overall business strategy.
And fourthly, we realized that the computing sector is highly reliant on the open ecosystem. So this is also an area of focus for Huawei. Talking about ecosystem, maybe you still remember that four years ago, in 2015, Huawei released the first version of the Huawei Developer Program. Over the past four years, we have made significant progress with this program. We have developed over 1.3 million developers and over 14,000 ISV partners. I know that among the audience, many of you are our developers and ISV partners. I really appreciate your efforts and support. Your support has made us more confident towards the future. So in this year's Huawei Connect, I'd like to take this opportunity to announce the new round of Huawei Developer Program. We commit to invest 1.5 billion US dollars to expand the developer community. We hope that in the future, the developer community will increase from 1.3 million to 5 million. On the third day of this conference, my colleague will share more details about this with you.
So just now, I have talked about Huawei's computing strategy, the four aspects. And next, I'd like to talk about some of the progress we have made based upon this strategy. First, general-purpose computing strategy. We have already launched Kunpeng series processors. We'll continue to invest in its servers, OS, database, compilers, and other key technologies and products. The purpose is through strategic investment to connect to the whole value chain and give our partners confidence in its growth potential and build out the Kunpeng ecosystem. And right now, we're working with partners to lay the foundation for the Kunpeng ecosystem. We're working with partners from different places to leverage the local strengths to build different communities for Kunpeng innovation. And these innovation hubs will become a platform where partners across the ecosystem will get together, and we can carry out application pilots, cultivate talent, and develop standards as a team. This work has already started, and we've received very good feedback so far. In Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Xiamen, and several other cities, we have implemented this strategy, and we look forward to seeing more partners join us across the ecosystem. We have great confidence in building the Kunpeng ecosystem together with our partners. So that's about general-purpose computing.
And next, let's look at AI computing. Last year, Eric Xu announced our full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio on this very stage. Back then, frankly speaking, we had only launched part of the components. We've heard some concerns from our partners. They were wondering when Huawei would put all of those things into reality. I want to say that every year, Huawei Connect is also a place for Huawei to answer all the questions and address the concerns. This year, we have fully implemented the full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio strategy. Ascend series processors are already shipped. For example, we have launched Ascend 910. And also, the AI computing framework, we also announced a full AI software stack. On Huawei Cloud, we have provided the training and the inference services. Well, also, we have a series of servers and processors being used in Huawei's devices. So today, I can assure you that Huawei's full-stack, all-scenario AI solution has been fully implemented. So you should be assured to work with us.
Talking about AI, based upon the full-stack, all-scenario AI solution, I want to announce another heavyweight product at this stage. Please enjoy a video.
This is Atlas 900. It is the world's fastest AI training cluster, combining the power of thousands of Ascend processors. So how fast is it? I want to show some figures with you here. ResNet-50 is the industry standard for measuring AI training performance. It is an industry-standard model. We used this model to test our Atlas 900. Atlas 900 has finished the entire training in just 59.8 seconds. Compared to the second performer, it is 10 seconds faster. You might think 10 seconds is not a very big difference. So what does this mean? Imagine a sprinter in a competition. If the gold medal winner has crossed the finish line and he has enough time to drink a lot of water before the second person arrives, this is the difference between Atlas and the product ranked second. Atlas 900 is a powerhouse of AI computing, and it could be widely used for scientific research and business innovation. You may know that in scientific research and business innovation, computing power has become a bottleneck. I've once heard some friends complain to me, in the universities, in order to run a solution, it may take months or weeks of time, and it may take another month or so to tune it further. Our researchers also complained in Huawei. Well, with Atlas 900's ultimate computing power, all of these complaints will disappear. And next, I'd like to share with you a real case so you can see how Atlas 900 can help scientific research. Please enjoy another video.
Let's welcome Mr. Philip Diamond, the Director General of the Square Kilometre Array Organisation.