The mobile RAN and core were traditionally built as dedicated appliances based on proprietary chips that were designed for the purpose, and as the cellular network vendors consolidated, this was one factor in locking operators into a very limited choice of architectures, which were firmly closed to third parties. As the core, and eventually the RAN, move to the cloud, there is a growing role for merchant processor vendors such as Intel, Marvell, AMD and Nvidia. Not that a demanding technology like a 5G RAN really can run on basic COTS hardware, as the early vision of ‘Cloud RAN’ argued. Commoditized servers running on unadorned Intel processors will not be up to the job of enabling compute- intensive Layer 1…