Nvidia used to be the outsider knocking on the door of Intel’s castle with its GPUs (graphical processor units). Now, the GPU has grown well beyond its roots in powering PC visuals and become a key building block in high performance computing and cloud architectures – to the extent that Intel has been forced to abandon its former hostility to the approach, and announce its own GPUs. But Nvidia has a clear headstart here, and has been steadily bringing its architecture into the telecoms world. Its opportunity lies in the very high end infrastructure that will be needed to run a cloud-native RAN, in particular, to the same level of performance as a conventional access network. Even Intel accepts that…