Intel Diving Headfirst Into 5G Infrastructure
You’ve probably been reading a lot about the pending 5G revolution, both here and elsewhere. Telecom companies and cellular providers are ramping up to meet the growing demand for lower latency and higher bandwidth – but they’re not alone. Chip makers are racing to stake out their own territory in the burgeoning 5G market, specifically network infrastructure. With the U.S. government effectively banning foreign enterprises from contributing to the development of nationwide 5G infrastructure, the opportunities for American companies is even greater. Intel, maybe the biggest game in town (or in this case, the world) when it comes to silicon, is diving into the deep end of the 5G pool with a variety of new hardware designed to help develop that infrastructure from core to edge.
“As the industry makes the transition to 5G, we continue to see network infrastructure as the most significant opportunity, representing a $25 billion silicon opportunity by 2023,” according to Navin Shenoy, Executive VP and General Manager of Intel’s data platform group. “By offering customers the fastest and most effective path to design, deliver and deploy 5G solutions across core, edge and access, we are poised to expand our leading silicon position in this growing market.”
The centerpiece of Intel’s commitment to 5G infrastructure is the Intel Atom P5900 processor, a 10 nm SoC (system-on-chip) designed for wireless base stations. Intel expects the Atom P5900, the first such chip to utilize Intel’s proprietary architecture, to put Intel at the top of silicon providers in wireless base stations by 2021, which the company boasts is a year ahead of even its own internal projections. The new SoC can deliver up to 5.6 times more secured network communication and up to 3.7 times more packet processing when used in conjunction with the Intel Atom 5952B processor and supplementary Intel technology (as compared to pairing the Atom P5900 with software alone), according to the company.
Intel also announced the second generation of its Xeon Gold scalable processors, which the company boasts provide an average of 36% more performance and 42% more performance per dollar than its predecessors. The new Intel Xeon Gold 6200 processors add more cores as well as increased cache sizes and/or greater processor frequency than the previous generation. Intel foresees the processors as optimal solutions for both mainstream and high-performance use cases, while also providing added value for entry-level, edge, networking, and IoT applications.
Intel’s first next-generation structured ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) for 5G network acceleration is code-named “Diamond Mesa” (the nom de guerre could use some work) – the company believes the structured ASIC strikes a balance between the relatively quick time-to-market and easy programmability of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) and the streamlined performance of typical ASICs.
In addition, the company also introduced the Intel Ethernet 700 Series Network Adapter (code-named “Edgewater Channel” – engineers obviously don’t excel at coming up with aliases) with hardware-enhanced PTP (precision time protocol) for 5G, edge and other use cases that require precise timing and latency. Existing Ethernet technology has struggled to keep up with the latency demands of 5G network implementations, particularly when it comes to edge servers. By maintaining precise synchronization across the network, Edgewater Channel anticipates solving those application latency issues.
By integrating these products with new investments in software and collaborations with 5G industry leaders, Intel hopes to secure its place as the primary provider of silicon to the 5G networking infrastructure community at home and (possibly) abroad. The company anticipates as many as 6 million 5G wireless base stations worldwide by 2024 – which means potential profits in the 20-40 billion-dollar range for the chip industry. Intel will have competition for those dollars, but they seem well positioned to take home a substantial piece of that pie.