Nokia and Intel partner on silicon technology for 5G radio and cloud infrastructure

Nokia unveiled a handful of new 5G technologies that they developed with the help of Intel, which recently announced its own new slate of 5G offerings. In a press release, Nokia representatives said the company is now shipping variants of its 5G AirScale radio access solution, which was built with Intel’s silicon technology innovations embedded into it. Nokia is also working to decrease the energy footprint of 5G networks globally and improve performance by expanding the range of its ReefShark chipsets, which are part of the company’s larger silicon strategy for 5G. 

Intel also worked to develop custom-built ASIC solutions that will come equipped with Nokia’s 5G “powered by ReefShark” radio offerings and the company plans to incorporate Intel’s Xeon scalable processor in their AirFrame cloud date center solution. 

“Implementing technology innovations from the core to the edge of the network is key to unlocking the full potential of 5G,” said Dan Rodriguez, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Network Platforms Group. 

“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.”

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In a statement, the two companies said they already worked together on Intel’s Atom P5900 processor, so it was natural that the silicon solutions they developed together would be incorporated in Nokia’s AirScale radio access products, which are now being shipped across the world as one part of their larger 5G “Powered by ReefShark” portfolio.

According to Nokia, ReefShark’s widespread adoption within 5G networks will help to lower their energy footprint as they are rolled out in more countries globally. The ReefShark chipsets are part of Nokia’s larger efforts to expand their investment in 5G. 

On Thursday, the company announced that they would unveil their first 5G smartphone on March 19 in London as part of the roll out for the upcoming James Bond film, “No Time To Die.”

With the jointly designed silicon chip technology, the ReefShark chipsets have superior data throughput and lower energy consumption, which helps support Nokia’s 5G AirScale network solutions. The chipsets are now being used as part of a number of base station elements and Nokia said they are working with many different partners to help support the ReefShark family of chipsets.

In addition to their collaborations on 5G technologies, the two companies teamed up to provide Nokia’s AirFrame data center solution for edge and core with Intel’s Xeon Scalable processor, which comes with built-in AI acceleration. Nokia’s statement said the same processor will also be used in their AirScale all-in-cloud virtual RAN (vRAN) and 5G core solutions to meet the requirements demanded by 5G technologies.

“This partnership highlights our continued commitment to ensuring our 5G portfolio is underpinned by best-in-class technology,” said Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia. 

“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.”

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