Battle of the accelerators breaks out as chip giants target vRAN Time and again at MWC 2023, in conversations about open virtualized RAN, the same mighty barriers to adoption were cited by operators and vendors. These were the cost and complexity of systems integration, and the performance trade-offs incurred when deploying high-performance base stations, especially those with Massive MIMO antenna arrays. Many organizations with an interest in pushing an open, multivendor version of vRAN have turned their attention and innovation to at least one of these huge issues of cost/performance. The new solutions for the latter challenge were particularly prominent in Barcelona, creating a battle of the accelerators on the show floors. One of the most demanding workloads known to…