BARCELONA, Spain – Intel unveiled new fourth-generation Xeon scalable processors designed with a virtualized radio access network (vRAN) boost, codenamed Sapphire Rapids II.

These general purpose chips should match or improve upon the performance per Watt of "the best custom dedicated Layer 1 accelerator cards on the market today," Sachin Katti, Intel SVP and GM of network and edge, told a group of reporters leading up to Mobile World Congress 2023.

With Intel vRAN Boost, acceleration is integrated into the same general purpose platform as Xeon SOC, which removes the need for an additional custom accelerator card, Katti explained. This means operators can consolidate base station layer software processing on one common virtualized platform.

"You don't need to be buying multiple different hardware parts. Intel vRAN Boost will deliver up to twice the capacity without increasing the power envelope for we run workloads versus previous generations," he said. "That acceleration is delivering an added 20% compute power savings and, of course, the reduced bill of material cost because we don't need that separate accelerator card anymore."

With this expansion of the fourth-generation Xeon family, Intel hopes "to build the kind of platforms that allow our customers to build software-defined network infrastructure, and specifically for telco and wireless networks, [to] bring the same cloud-native economics and agility that we have come to enjoy for all of our other computing needs," Katti said.

That level of telco agility has "felt unattainable" in the past and "may still feel unattainable today," but the vendor seems confident its dream "will become reality very quickly," Katti said. According to a report from Dell'Oro Group, more than 90% of core networks will be virtualized by the end of 2023, "and nearly all known virtualized core networks run on Intel," he touted.

On the network operators' side of the equation, network automation and agility will come only after they ditch proprietary stacks for more general purpose, horizontal cloud-native infrastructure, like that built with Intel's dedicated Layer 1 chips. The other factor expected to drive adoption of Intel vRan Boost is an increase in complex applications beyond mobile broadband that require different 5G network behavior.

"As we increasingly see more and more IoT-like deployments, whether it's a connected car, whether it's smart meters, and increasingly more sophisticated kind of automated driving drones, ... those require a different behavior from the network than what you would do for mobile broadband network," Katti said.

Virtualizing the RAN and making it a cloud-native RAN infrastructure means "you need to do it all the way through to Layer 1. You cannot be compromising," he argued. Operators need to run all of "the stack in a cloud-native manner, and we believe it's required to deliver on the full promise of 5G and software-defined cloud-native methods," Katti said.