As noted in this week’s Special Report, Intel and Marvell have benefited from Nokia’s shift away from its homegrown base station chip architecture, towards a system-on-chip (SoC) based on merchant products. Nokia’s high-profile change of heart may have thrown the spotlight on the two chip providers’ latest 5G-related announcements, but it is not the only news. Both companies have been discussing the developments they would have unveiled at the cancelled Mobile World Congress, and these reflect a rapid pace of change in the mobile network chip space. This change is driven, of course, by the migration of the macro RAN from proprietary platforms based on equipment vendors’ own ASICs (application specific integrated circuits), to basebands running as virtual network functions…