In the first of three Interview segments Dan talks with Guy Daniels about Intel’s Investments in the Radio Access Network and its plan to reach 40% of the mobile base station market by 2022 . Does Intel still think it’s going to carve out that large a market share, Guy asks? Not only does it think it’s on-track, but it projects that it will get to 40% by 2021, claims Dan, who also talks about the advantages of Intel’s new Atom P5900 (see below).

What about the edge? Dan says you can’t really think about 5G in isolation from the edge. A powerful edge is going to be crucial if 5G is to support all the business cases and applications it’s been designed for and Intel will be placing a lot of effort into supporting it too.

Intel is making a concerted push to win a leading market share in silicon technology for base stations and 5G infrastructure generally.

5G is about unleashing more bandwidth and doing more complicated things with the resulting data once it arrives in the network. That means a huge amount of network processing power is going to be needed... not just on the smartphone but more especially on the network. Intel is therefore setting out its case for going after infrastructure rather than devices.

“As the industry makes the transition to 5G, we continue to see network infrastructure as the most significant opportunity,” said Navin Shenoy, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Platforms Group at Intel. Shenoy says Intel is eyeing a silicon market it reckons will be worth $25 billion by 2023.

Its silicon charge is being led by the just announced Atom P5900 - its first 10 nanometer ‘system-on-a chip' (SoC). The Atom P5900 has been designed to maximise both throughput and low latency, says Intel, and it will be the foundation of the Intel basestation offer - a market expected to spawn 6 million basestations through to 2024.

Wires and fibers

Back in the supporting wired network, Intel is introducing new ‘2nd Generation’ Xeon Scalable processors. The Xeons have already passed the 30 million unit sales mark. Now with half of core networks transforming with the onset of processor-hungry network virtualisation, the second gen Xeons have been designed to deliver an average of 36% more performance and an average of 42% more performance per dollar spent.

Also new on the block is” Diamond Mesa”, Intel’s first next-gen structured ASIC for 5G network acceleration; and the company’s Ethernet 700 Series 5G optimised network adaptor, its first to feature GPS-based cross-network service synchronization with hardware-enhanced Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

New Software

Intel is expanding its edge computing software toolkits to accelerate time-to-market for its customers and partners. New capabilities are to be integrated into the Open Network Edge Services Software (OpenNESS) toolkit which now supports standalone 5GNR and Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) deployments, giving customers the flexibility to easily deploy their choice of cloud-native edge microservices. OpenNESS complements Intel’s OpenVINO and Open Visual Cloud for edge computing development needs.

Filmed in San Francisco, February, 2020