The slow shift of the mobile industry towards virtualized RANs (vRANs), in which many baseband functions are run as software on common cloud infrastructure, is mainly perceived as an opportunity for Intel. Finally, networks will run on cloud infrastructure – platforms dominated by Intel processors – rather than dedicated chips designed by the equipment vendors specifically for RAN functions. This has appeared to be Intel’s game to lose. Some challengers have suggested ARM-based alternatives targeted at vRAN and other high performance cloud applications. Cavium and Huawei both have very credible offerings, though Qualcomm seems to have backed away. At a future stage when operators might deploy their vRANs in third party clouds such as AWS, there could be more presence…