Once dominated by proprietary hardware and highly specialized ASICs, the dynamic nature of 5G is challenging the way telecommunications vendors like Nokia, Ericcson, ZTE, and Samsung think about cellular networks. Many have made a hard pivot to more flexible architectures from chipmakers like Intel and Marvell for the next generation of 5G equipment.

Both chipmakers have had a busy start to the year announcing a string of new chipsets and industry partnerships. In fact, Nokia, which has thus far struggled with high 5G equipment costs and low margins, announced plans to use both Intel's new Atom base station processor as well as Marvell's Arm-based Octeon chips in its ReefShark AirScale Modules.

Intel's Atom P5900, announced in February, is based on the chipmaker's 10-nanometer manufacturing process and is "designed from the ground up to meet the needs of the radio access network (RAN)," said Dan Rodriquez, VP of Intel's network platforms group.

However, this Atom bears little in common with its namesake processor from the late 2000s, wrote Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, in a Forbes article. "This [Atom] is completely rearchitected from the ground up and has identical feature sets to its big brother Xeon," he wrote. "This is a huge growth opportunity for Intel, and the Atom P5900 represents a crucial play by the company to take advantage of it."

Nokia, Ericsson, and ZTE have all announced plans to use the base station processor in their 5G equipment.

In many ways, Intel sees the chip as the harbinger of market dominance at least as far as base station silicon goes. The move is a dramatic one as just a few short years ago Intel wasn't even a major player in the base station market.

"Prior to 2015, Intel had no significant market segment share in the base station silicon market," Rodriquez admits.

Intel now projects it will be the leader in base station silicon by 2021.

Alongside the new base station silicon, Intel also in February unveiled its first 5G structured ASICs, called Diamond Mesa, and launched its 700 series network adapters, which are designed for extreme low-latency applications like 5G.

But while Intel doubles down on 5G silicon, the company faces stiff competition from the likes of Marvell and Ampere, which claim lower cost of ownership and higher performance per watt by building on the Arm architecture.

Marvell's Octeon Fusion chips, announced earlier this month, are designed to power network infrastructure like switches, routers, secure gateways, firewalls, smartNICs, and 5G base stations. The Octeon TX2 ships with between four and 36 Arm v8 cores and a complement of hardware accelerators, which, as the name suggests, are designed to speed up security, packet processing, and traffic management. According to Marvell VP of Infrastructure Processors John Sakamoto, these hardware accelerators are essential to keep up with the growing traffic demands created by IoT and 5G.

"Because of the higher traffic rates generated by these devices, the days of just throwing CPU cores and trying to handle the higher data rates, I think is something that's run out of steam," he said.

Marvell's Octeon Fusion chip is based on the Octeon TX2 but adds a layer one processor, making it ideal for use in 5G deployments.

According to John Schimpf, senior director of product marketing for Marvell's wireless business unit, the chips provide vendors with an alternative to in-house ASICs. "By collaborating with tier one [OEMs] in the design, we're able to provide what we believe is the performance of an ASIC, but still have the flexibility of a processor," he said.

And Nokia isn't the only vendor planning to use Marvell's chips. This month, Samsung announced it was expanding its partnership with the chipmaker to develop a new generation of RAN products.

Marvell's contract wins caught the attention of Moorhead, who, in a research note, said he was "intrigued by the company's recent broadening relations with both Nokia and Samsung, as I believe both companies will gain market share in their perspective 5G target markets." And in an email to SDxCentral, Moorhead noted that Marvell's chips are fulfilling the carrier's desire for powerful, flexible silicon for 5G infrastructure.

While not entirely 5G focused, Marvell and Arm compatriot Ampere are taking aim at Intel's newly refreshed second-generation Xeon Scalable chips. These are designed for use in a variety of high-performance computing, data center, edge, and 5G applications. Nokia's AirFrame data center platform, for example, uses Intel's Xeon Scalable chips for 5G core and edge compute.

However, price to performance and power consumption remain key in this space, and in this regard, Intel has some catching up to do.

Ampere's latest datacenter-class processor, Altra, is based on an Arm Neoverse N1 architecture and produced using TSMC's 7-nanometer process. The chip is available with up to 80 cores, and it offers clock speeds peaking at 3 GHz, far eclipsing Intel on core count even after accounting for the fact Ampere's new chip is single-threaded.

More importantly, the Ampere Altra claims more than twice the performance and power efficiency compared to Intel's 28-core Xeon 8280 chipset, all at a lower cost of ownership.

Meanwhile, Marvell is aiming its own ThunderX2 data center chips at the same verticals as Intel. Together with the Octeon Fusion and Octeon TX2, the company says the three chips will form the basis of its 5G RAN infrastructure.