Samsung and Intel have announced the expansion of their long-running RAN partnership, using new native silicon functions to provide better performance in virtualized radio access network (vRAN) deployments, using Samsung’s vRAN 3.0 software. Specifically, the news sees Samsung using Intel’s new 4th generation Xeon Scalable CPUs. The chips feature the vRAN Boost tooling, which the pair says provides significant performance gains for virtualized RAN deployments. They have been working together in this sector since 2017, and Samsung has won vRAN deployments with Dish Network, Vodafone, and KDDI – coyly described as tier-one operators in the US, UK, and Japan. In an earlier MWC announcement, Samsung talked of a North American deployment it was expecting to be the first deployment for…