Written by Nick Wood for Telecoms.com
US chip giant Intel has struck a deal that could shore up its already strong position in the RAN market.
It has agreed to manufacture custom 5G system-on-chip (SoC)s for Ericsson, which the Swedish kit maker will use to develop what promises to be “highly differentiated” networking products. The chips will be based on Intel’s latest fabrication process, 18A (1.8nm), which is so new that it has yet to begin commercial production.
When it does, the chips will offer up to a 10% improvement in performance per watt compared to current production processes, we’re told. This is important when it comes to networking, simply because the faster the processor, the faster the network.
Intel and Ericsson have also agreed to work more closely together to optimise the performance of Intel’s latest Xeon RAN processors on Ericsson’s cloud RAN hardware, taking aim at capacity, energy efficiency, flexibility and scalability.
In June, Ericsson laid claim to being the first vendor to use the new chip – the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor with Intel vRAN Boost, to use its official but not exactly succinct name – to carry out an end-to-end cloud RAN call. That in itself was an achievement given that the processor made its official debut at Mobile World Congress a few months earlier.
