Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and chip manufacturer Ampere are collaborating on the development of an Arm server processor for use in Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) environments, based on inline acceleration technology. This processor should offer telecom operators more choices in which technology they use to virtualize their networks. The collaboration focuses on developing an Arm-based processor with fewer cores than existing Ampere Arm processors, likely 48-64 cores. This is because the network functionality can be handled by hardware accelerators with the most needed computing power.
Inline acceleration technology allows the baseband functionality, Layer 1, to be offloaded from the processor to accelerator cards in an HPE server. This frees up the Ampere processor for the layer 2 and 3 functions for less computationally demanding RAN functionality. However, several large telecom operators indicate that they find the purchase of additional accelerator cards unnecessary and too expensive, preferring Intel-based lookaside technology instead. Additionally, inline acceleration currently lacks an extensive ecosystem.
