For several years, Intel and several other IT companies have advocated for an alternative general-purpose approach, this initiative encourages telecommunications companies and their equipment suppliers to abandon the specialized technologies favor of the chips and platforms generally used in data centres, standard personal computers as well and on-premises servers.
Similar to Intel’s promotion of its x86 architecture, Nvidia is placing its technology as the cornerstone of a cloud RAN, which could achieve significantly greater economics of scale than any existing specialized networks. Nvidia has strategically capitalized on what it perceives as the shortcomings of the older general-purpose technologies.
Intel did gain benefit from Moore’s Law which mentioned that the number of transistors on a silicon chip would double approximately every two years, however, it is believed by the CEO of Nvidia that Moore’s Law is no longer applicable.
Nvidia has a clear incentive to portray GPUs as a viable solution for RAN and with indications of a slowdown in spending from hyperscalers, the company stands to earn billions if global telecommunications firms show a similar demand for its chips. Significantly, SoftBank of Japan is already planning a commercial rollout and the operators in other regions are in discussions to follow suit.
Acknowledgement by key executives at Ericsson and Nokia regarding the appropriateness of GPUS for compute-intensive RAN tasks is quite significant for Nvidia. The Head of Nokia’s mobile networks business group, Tommi Uitoot in an interview earlier this year, mentioned that Graphics processing units are specifically well-suited for Layer 1 computing because of the vector processing capabilities they have.
His counterpart at Ericsson, Fredrik Jejdling in the same year in October stated that the Swedish company was investigating the feasibility of deploying its RAN software on the GPUs of Nvidia.
Nvidia’s technology could make 5G networks more cost-effective and efficient however, it is yet to be seen whether it will be widely adopted by the telecom industry or not.
