Cloud RAN has proved a conundrum for operators and vendors as the final frontier for cloud computing technology in mobile networks. It has brought challenges on the silicon front, because of the range of baseband functions involved, from highly latency-intensive tasks, such as AI-based real-time traffic prediction, to less critical functions in service and policy management. For all of these to be executed around a COTS (Comercial Off The Shelf) processor, there has to be some dedicated acceleration for those more time-critical or intensive functions, which itself imposes constraints over the choice of platform. For cloud RAN, Intel took a strong position by incorporating hardware acceleration directly inside its general-purpose x86 CPUs. That drew a mixed reaction, on the one…