If demanding telecoms workloads like virtualized RAN and 5G core are to move to the public cloud, the cloud providers will need to ensure their infrastructure is based on processors capable of supporting these functions. Suppliers like Intel are already investing in accelerators to surround their processors, for cloud hardware that can cope with artificial intelligence (AI), vRAN and other very high performance tasks. But in some cases, the webscalers themselves are also designing or commissioning their own processors to meet the demands of the new generation of cloud-based services and make sure their clouds are a match for specialized private cloud platforms. Google, Amazon AWS and others have periodically announced such developments, raising new challenges for Intel and other…