Nokia this week revealed both Intel and Marvell's newly announced base station chips would power variants of its ReefShark AirScale modules. Meanwhile, Samsung says it will expand its relationship with Marvell as it ramps up its own 5G hardware push.

The announcements come just days after Marvell unveiled its latest generation of Octeon infrastructure chips, and a little more than a week after Intel showed off its own 10-nanometer base station chip.

Marvell's Octeon TX2 is aimed at appliances like switches, routers, secure gateways, firewalls, and smartNICs, while its Octeon Fusion chip adds dedicated Layer-1 processing capabilities for use in base stations. Both chips can be customized to incorporate customer intellectual property (IP).

Intel's Atom P5900, on the other hand, is designed specifically for use in radio access networks (RAN).

Nokia says it is working with both chipmakers to diversify the company's ReefShark portfolio. The telecom vendor noted that it will also use Intel's Xeon Scalable processors in its AirFrame data center platform, which is aimed at 5G core and edge applications.

Nokia's ReefShark platform, which was announced in 2018, is based on two architectures. The first is focused on compute capacity and the other for radio frequency (RF) applications. Both include artificial intelligence (AI) from Nokia Bell Labs.

Samsung, which has a long-standing relationship with Marvell and has utilized the company's Octeon chips in previous base stations, says it will expand its collaboration with the chipmaker to additional segments of the RAN.

According to Samsung, Marvell's Octeon chips will enable the complex and compute-heavy beamforming algorithms required for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) deployments.

According to Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, in an earlier email to SDxCentral, Marvell's chips are fulfilling carrier's desire for powerful, flexible silicon for 5G infrastructure.

"I am intrigued by the company's recent broadening relationships with both Nokia and Samsung as I believe both companies will gain market share in their prospective 5G target markets," Moorhead wrote in a research note.