Whitepaper “Determining the Right Hardware for Open RAN Deployment” published with Intel

We are proud that the whitepaper on determining the right hardware for Open RAN deployment has been officially published. 

This is one of the outcomes of a successful product benchmarking project done together with Intel to compare the performance of 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors for Open RAN 5G centralized units and distributed units. 

The whitepaper consists of: 

• Introduction, including a concise description of Open RAN, disaggregation COTS, and the focus of the whitepaper,
• Test environment description, including test methodology and results,
• Conclusions,
• Further study topics.

The benchmarking results showed that the 3rd generation Xeon CPU is a considerably more efficient than the 2nd generation: Ice Lake (ICX) is more efficient than Cascade Lake (CSL), especially on the distributed units (L1 & L2), and in some L1 applications it is more than 70% more efficient. Also, the potential CAPEX savings using ICX instead of CSL are clear (fewer COTS servers required), as well as OPEX savings in energy consumption.  

The whitepaper is published in the Intel® Network Builders solutions library and it is available publicly for download. 

We congratulate Aspire Technology engineers and project managers working on the project, Intel engineering and marketing colleagues, and many others that contributed to this complex and cutting-edge technology project.