Wind River commercializes Studio, showing Intel what might have been

Wind River may well turn out to be the one that got away for Intel. The chip giant acquired the software company – a specialist in real time networking and virtualization long before 5G put these technologies in the spotlight – in 2009, but in 2018, spun it out and then sold the resulting unit to TPG Capital. We have always argued that Wind River brought some crown jewels that Intel could have exploited better, and these advantages are becoming clearer as a few operators start to deploy 5G virtualized RAN (vRAN). Verizon deployed its first 5G macro vRAN last summer, running on Intel technology (Xeon Scalable processors, FPGA-based accelerators and FlexRAN reference architecture), Samsung network equipment and Wind River’s…