Intel gave up, some time ago, arguing that general purpose Xeon processors, however powerful, would be sufficient to support all the complex and demanding workloads of a virtualized 5G RAN. That market will be driven by custom logic, and the company is assembling a broad portfolio of options to surround Xeon. It can now offer FPGA (field programmable gate array), structure ASIC and full custom ASIC, with the 5G vRAN one of its top three targets. It has made several acquisitions to support the strategy, including FPGA major Altera, structured ASIC provider eASIC, and now, a second FPGA company, Omnitek. These options will support different use cases and workloads, allowing demand tasks like artificial intelligence or virtualized RAN to be…