One of the biggest challenges for operators looking to migrate to a virtualized RAN (vRAN) is to find the right chipset combinations. The vRAN may be all about software, but the 5G workloads are so intensive that many operators question whether general purpose hardware could ever support them as effectively as dedicated platforms. Traditionally, macro base station vendors designed or commissioned their own proprietary chipsets, fully optimized for intensive RAN tasks such as high end signal processing. The economics of dedicated, inhouse platforms are hard to justify when margins are tightening and operators are demanding the cost-effectiveness and scalability seen in the cloud. Nokia’s decision to move away from its own FPGA-based base station chips to a more packaged solution…