AMD: Expanding Telco Partnerships and Advancing 5G and 6G
As it continues to lead in AI sectors, AMD is also striving to focus on its relationships with telcos in order to diversify their networks.
As its share prices continue to soar, the semiconductor company is focusing its attention on communications services providers (CSPs), who need powerful and scalable platforms that also do not compromise on energy efficiency or costs.
The telco industry is currently shifting towards more open and virtualised networks in the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) space. This will only continue to gain momentum for CSPs given the advantages, which include the ability to easily build, customise and manage the network for diverse requirements.
Advancing telco and 5G networking leadership
The mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) market is expected to grow from US$66.13bn in 2023 to US$91.68bn by 2028, at a CAGR of 6.75%. Currently, the largest market is in the USA, which was expected to be worth US$27.6bn by the end of 2023.
With this in mind, AMD has been showcasing its advances in 5G, 6G, vRAN and OpenRAN at MWC Barcelona 2024. The event marks two years since AMD closed its acquisition of semiconductor manufacturing company Xilinx, further cementing AMD as a leading player in telco and networking.
The company is currently working to expand its product portfolio from processors for 5G networking, to telco accelerators and adaptive computing for wireless infrastructure. For instance, AMD telco accelerator cards are able to free up telco server processors for more commercialised software functions - allowing easier deployment for the 5G virtualised edge.
5G operators are moving away from the more traditional proprietary wireless equipment and instead opting for a more open telco server approach. A more virtualised 5G allows telco services to be offered at the edge, which includes video streaming and gaming.
With this in mind, AMD is seeking to break new ground in the telco sector via 5G and compute innovations. The company’s EPYC processors aim to deliver high performance and reduce energy consumption, enabling users to meet higher demands with fewer physical servers - ultimately lowering network and cooling costs for telco operators.
The processors are being used by the likes of Ericsson and Telstra to deliver energy efficiency and modernisation for innovative 5G core functions. According to Ericsson, the EPYC CPUs can deliver up to 49% less energy consumption.
Advancing vRAN leadership
AMD is also advancing vRAN with Samsung as part of their expanding collaboration to move towards cloud-native technology. vRAN and OpenRAN systems can provide this pathway and offer more flexibility, compared to traditional RANs.
Announced in February 2024, AMD and Samsung have partnered with other leading telco operator Vodafone to drive virtualised RAN solutions with the EPYC processors.
As AMD continues to expand OpenRAN adoption, it is clear that these collaborations with telecommunications companies will seek to continue developing high–performance solutions for a more diverse telco environment.
“The telco industry continues to demand new levels of performance and energy efficiency with increasingly complex workloads and stringent efficiency targets,” says Kumaran Siva, Corporate Vice President, Strategic Market Development at AMD.
“AMD EPYC 8004 Series CPUs are optimised for modern edge and vRAN deployment models to enable the telco industry’s current evolution toward truly end-to-end open, virtualized networks. We are extremely proud of our collaboration with Samsung and Vodafone, leveraging our latest data centre processors to modernise legacy telco infrastructure and deliver the leadership Open RAN performance, efficiency and scalability needed to build highly innovative mobile networks.”
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