We have often analyzed how the industry push for a fully open RAN platform is at odds with the rising performance demands of 5G. That dilemma is thrown under the spotlight by a new partnership between Ericsson and Intel, to co-design custom processors to support virtualized RAN (vRAN) – not just the radio unit or acceleration chips, which are often vendor-specific, but the processors powering the baseband’s cloud servers. This is exactly the silicon that Open RAN supporters want to be fully off-the-shelf. Ericsson and Intel have worked together on RAN processors for a decade, but as vRAN starts to become commercially real, this looks like a strategic alliance, which will see the Swedish company using Intel’s forthcoming 18A process…