Intel's third-generation Xeon Scalable processors position the vendor to better target 5G network transformation efforts with a more flexible infrastructure on various fronts, according to Dan Rodriguez, VP and GM of the Network Platforms Group at Intel.

The technical standards, flexible frameworks, and ultimate vision for 5G elevate the importance of silicon in multiple ways, Rodriguez told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

A trio of inflection points including 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and edge computing, underpin what Intel expects to be a total addressable market of $25 billion for silicon in the networking industry by 2024, he said.

“5G has been built from the ground up to not only support mobile broadband but also support a wide variety of vertical markets, so it’s been really built for different enterprise use cases,” Rodriguez said. “When people think about a 5G network, they do think about a network that really needs to be designed for service flexibility.”

Intel’s latest chips, which are now being sampled by multiple telecom operators and vendors, including AT&T, Cisco, Rakuten Mobile, SK Telecom, Verizon, and Vodafone, “need to both support everything from cloud gaming for consumers to all sorts of use cases that could be in a factory floor, a retail environment, or smart city,” he explained.

“I think that’s what’s causing a lot of great conversation about silicon in a 5G network, but it’s also an infrastructure utilizing silicon that enables it to be flexible and agile, really built from the ground up,” Rodriguez said. 

Intel’s telecom customers are almost universally focused on deploying 5G standalone core networks, extending virtualization to their radio access networks (RAN), and assembling an edge computing platform, and the vendor today introduced a class of network-optimized chips that address those requirements, according to Rodriguez.

2020 was a “tipping point year” for network core virtualization with about half of all core network workloads now running in a virtualized environment, he added. “That number is expected to grow to about 80% plus by 2024.”

Third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors feature between eight and 40 cores with different feature sets and power requirements to meet various network and equipment needs. The vendor claims it can increase 5G user-plane function (UPF) performance by up to 42%, and data center workload performance by about 46% compared to the previous generation. 

Rakuten Mobile is using Intel’s latest chips to power its mobile cloud platform server, which the operator is building to support multiple network workloads in central and regional data centers, according to Intel.

The chipmaker is also working to elevate its status in virtualized RAN (vRAN) by doubling massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) throughput to 10 Gb/s with a 64T64R antenna array that supports 128 total antenna elements, including receive and transmit functions. Intel name-dropped both Verizon and Vodafone as early vRAN customers for their respective 5G networks.

RAN is of particular interest to Intel. “This is a segment that Intel has invested in. It’s a segment that we are actually winning in today, and we are the leading silicon in base stations,” Rodriguez said. “And then when you think about the journey to virtualizing the RAN, to our knowledge all early vRAN deployments are running on Intel architecture.”

That claim is specific to Intel’s silicon and its FlexRAN reference software, he explained. Dozens of software vendors and hardware makers ship vRAN services and equipment that are powered by Intel chips and its FlexRAN reference software. 

Intel claims its new processors can deliver an average of 62% more performance, compared to the previous generation. The company also noted that the performance of its latest chips is elevated when paired with other Intel hardware and software, including Intel FPGAs, Intel Optane persistent memory, FlexRAN, Open Network Edge Services Software (OpenNESS), Open Visual Cloud, and Intel Smart Edge. 

More than 15 telecommunications equipment manufacturers and service providers are already readying Intel’s latest chips for initial deployments, according to Rodriguez. 

“We did tune SKUs with the network-optimized SKUs to be able to hit a wide range of performance, power, and number of cores to be able to meet what we believe is the sweet spot for telecom markets,” he said, adding that Intel latest silicon also supports PCIe Gen 4.0, which delivers double the bandwidth of the previous generation.