What’s New: This week at the Fyuz conference in Dublin, Ireland, Intel confirmed its soon-to-be-available Intel® Xeon® 6 SoC with Performance-cores is the right choice for virtual radio access network (vRAN) workloads and for operators looking to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO). Part of the Intel Xeon 6 family, the system-on-chip with its large core count and integrated Intel Ethernet will help network operators dramatically reduce their server footprint compared to previous platforms. Increased performance-per-watt further enhances this benefit with energy savings to reduce ongoing operating expenses.
“Our decadelong commitment to the telco market has put Intel processors at the heart of nearly every commercial vRAN deployment today. Intel Xeon 6 with built-in AI acceleration raises the bar on vRAN performance and power efficiency to meet operators’ demanding TCO and flexibility requirements.”
Why It Matters: As operators continue to upgrade their network infrastructure to take advantage of artificial intelligence, Intel’s newest Intel Xeon 6 processor is built for AI performance in RAN environments. Intel Xeon 6 SoC boasts powerful integrated AI acceleration with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX).
AI plays a major role in meeting operators’ RAN business goals and their demanding energy efficiency requirements, and having CPU-based acceleration can optimize power and resource utilization efficiencies, as well as minimize latency by not requiring additional hardware components to process AI inference workloads. Additionally, Intel Xeon 6 SoC’s combination of optimized architecture and capacity gain will help network operators dramatically reduce their server footprint, enabling the majority of site configurations that require two or more servers to run on just a single vRAN server1 — all leading to a reduction of operating expenses.
What’s Next: Coming in 2025, Intel Xeon 6 SoCs will set a new high-water mark in vRAN performance-per-watt, compact design and advanced AI capabilities. Intel offers a multi-generation roadmap of processor, Ethernet and software products to ensure the products' long-term success.
More Context: Intel Xeon 6 SoC Enables Consolidation of Multi-Server Open vRAN Sites to Single-Server Footprint (Cristina Rodriguez Blog)
Dec. 10 Update: The image with this post has been removed.
The Small Print:
1Based on architectural projections as of 11/2024 vs. 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor with Intel® vRAN Boost