UPDATED 19:46 EDT / FEBRUARY 25 2019

INFRA

Intel targets 5G network providers with FPGA-based accelerators

Intel Corp. is trying to win over 5G wireless service providers that need to handle growing volumes of virtualized workloads.

Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, it launched a new field-programmable gate array-based acceleration card called the N3000. The chipmaker said it expects the ongoing rollout of 5G wireless services and a shift toward network functions virtualization will lead to growing demand from networking providers for low-latency FPGAs and the higher bandwidth that 5G provides.

Driving this demand will be a rise in the number of connected “edge” devices and the resulting growth in new data traffic. Intel said its new accelerator card combines low latency FPGAs, which are chips that can be reprogrammed for specific kinds of workloads, with “enhanced mobile broadband” in order to create a larger data pipeline for “machine-to-machine connections.”

Intel said the card is designed for 5G service providers that are rushing to deliver virtualized radio access frameworks combined with NFV capabilities. The approach is meant to speed up virtualized workloads ranging from core network applications to 5G radio access networks, Intel said.

The N3000 Acceleration Card works by improving the data plane performance. It’s said to be able to accelerate network traffic by up to 100 gigabits per second and can support in-memory data processing for high performing applications.

One of Intel’s partners, Affirmed Networks Inc., said its cloud-native application container network saw a 50 percent reduction in resource usage when handling these increased data traffic loads. “5G is a transformative technology, and it requires advanced network virtualization infrastructure coupled with an agile software architecture,” said Ron Parker, chief architect at Affirmed Networks.

Affirmed Networks had developed a 5G core network platform based on Intel’s FPGA accelerator card that yielded 200 Gbps per server performance. The FPGAs took care of “smart” load balancing and CPU cache optimization, it said.

Intel’s new accelerator card is an important piece of hardware for enabling 5G networks, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE.

“The race for 5G is on and Mobile World Congress is the place to announce new products,” the analyst said. “The high throughput that is enabled by 5G means that the whole communications stack needs to be upgraded. What will be interesting to see is if the adoption happens at the infrastructure-as-a-service, telco provider or enterprise level.”

Also at MWC, Intel took the wraps off of a new system-on-chip dubbed “Hewitt Lake” that’s aimed at network edge, control plane, security and midrange storage workloads. Part of Intel’s Xeon D 64-bit multicore processor family, the new chip is said to boost both energy efficiency and performance for network edge devices.

Image: Intel

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