Finland’s Nokia today announced its partnership with Intel, to accelerate its, to date slow, move to 5G, after announcing another collaboration with Marvell Technology.
Upping Nokia’s 5G game
"significantly boosting performance and lowering the energy footprint of 5G network rollouts"
Nokia
“The companies have worked closely on the new Intel Atom P5900 processor that combines compute, connectivity and acceleration technologies. The jointly developed custom silicon solutions are included in Nokia’s AirScale radio access products being shipped worldwide as part of its 5G “Powered by ReefShark” portfolio. By adopting ReefShark widely in its AirScale portfolio, Nokia is significantly boosting performance and lowering the energy footprint of 5G network rollouts,” said the Finnish company in a statement.
Nokia has struggled to develop its Reefshark system on chips quickly enough to get ahead in the 5G game. The Reefshark system will allow a single chip to carry an entire computer system and so enable Nokia to produce equipment more cheaply.
Multi-layer partnership
Nokia is also incorporating the latest Intel Xeon processor technology in its cloud infrastructure and its AirFrame data center solution for edge and 5G core also uses the latest second generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor with built-in AI acceleration.
"showing the value that can be realized with a consistent, high-performance architecture across the intelligent 5G network"
Dan Rodriguez, Intel
“Implementing technology innovations from the core to the edge of the network is key to unlocking the full potential of 5G. Through our collaboration with Nokia, our broad portfolio of products and ASIC capabilities, we are showing the value that can be realized with a consistent, high-performance architecture across the intelligent 5G network,” said Dan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Network Platforms Group.
Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia said: “This partnership highlights our continued commitment to ensuring our 5G portfolio is underpinned by best-in-class technology. 5G networks need to support billions of devices and machines, and this massive increase in volume and scale means that existing infrastructure and components must evolve rapidly, adopting technologies and techniques to enable to deploy 5G networks quickly.”
Is it enough?
Nokia’s poor 5G performance has done some serious damage to the company’s market value. The change of CEO and partnerships with Intel and Marvell are certainly big steps towards catching up with the competition - it’ll be interesting to see the difference it makes and how quickly.
