Intel dominates early Open RAN and vRAN roll-outs thanks to its FlexRAN reference architecture, which has been part of a huge majority of operator trials and vendor developments so far. Open RAN stakeholders are open about their concerns that Intel could become a default monopoly in the processor layer, repeating its success in the ‘open’ PC platform, but so far they have had few other choices in the macro base station. Qualcomm is working on specialized chips for radio units and distributed units and the latter could challenge Intel (or coexist with x86) depending on the scenario. Marvell has coprocessors to handle intensive tasks offloaded from the CPU in a distributed unit. Start-ups like Picocom are focused mainly on small…