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Intel retains the top market share in the RAN baseband market
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Marvell is coming out with its own in-line 5G accelerators this year
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There are still concerns among operators about using mMIMO with virtualized O-RAN
Intel continues its reign as the market share leader in the baseband semiconductor market, Mobile Experts said, beating out rivals like Marvell, AMD and Qualcomm. In addition to topping the list for 5G and other cellular base stations,the chipmaker also leads in the the virtualized radio and other sectors of market.
“Intel is the #1 supplier in our market share rankings because they provide Application Specific Integrated circuits (ASICs), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and off the shelf Systems-on-Chips (SoCs),” said Mobile Experts Analyst Joe Madden in an email.
Many mobile network operators have already deployed virtualized radio access network (vRAN) networks using Intel Xeon chips. That includes Verizon, with tens of thousands of vRAN sites already deployed thanks to Samsung, as well as Rakuten, which is undertaking its own large open RAN deployment with Intel chips.
Intel is blazing a trial with vRAN with many FPGA-assisted Intel Xeon deployments with FlexRAN software out there already. These generally use third generation Xeon processors. The fourth generation Xeon launched last year with its integrated vRAN boost, and has been tested by Samsung but is not generally rolled out in commercial deployments yet.
Intel is not the only player, however, on the RAN scene.
"Marvell also has major market share,” Madden noted. “We can say that Marvell has much higher share than AMD and Qualcomm.” he added.
This is currently silicon for single-vendor custom RAN hardware. Marvell has been vocal over the last year on its preference for in-line 5G RAN accelerators with some operators being interested in Marvell’s approach.
“Marvell is introducing some in-line acceleration this year to commercial service and it will save some power compared with the baseline system,” Madden stated.
Meanwhile, AMD and Qualcomm have some market share in the cellular baseband semiconductor world. Other vendors like Nvidia have just started to make their initial moves in the cellular baseband market, marketing it as a 6G (!) rather than a 5G push.
“Nvidia is just getting started...so I am not aware of anything in commercial service for them,” Madden noted.
There is still much debate over the virtualized and – particularly – use in heavy radio processing tasks such as massive Multi Input Multi Output (mMIMO) antenna arrays.
“ORAN does result in slightly lower capacity, making some operators view the dedicated solutions as a better choice for urban mMIMO cases. But ORAN is catching up!” Madden concluded.