Developments in the high end processor industry were of limited interest to RAN engineers before the 5G era. High performance baseband processors were designed as vendor-proprietary ASICs by the network equipment vendors, so the main merchant chips related to the radio complex itself, and to device processors. But the start of virtualization of the RAN is throwing a spotlight on the role of general purpose processors (GPP), and of specialized accelerators sold by merchant chip providers rather than designed by vendors. Outside of greenfield networks like those of Dish Network and Rakuten, the progress towards vRANs – which run varying percentages of their digital network processing on cloud platforms – is very slow. In the macro network, fully cloud-based 5G…