Computer processor contender Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) bought its way into the radio access network (RAN) silicon market this decade with its purchase of Xilinx, which closed at $49. 8 billion on February 14, 2022.
With the acquisition, AMD gained “a very complete portfolio” of radio devices, Gilles Garcia, senior director of the data center and communications group at AMD, told Silverlinings on a call. He said that this portfolio is currently deployed at six of the top seven 5G wireless equipment manufacturers, including Cisco, Fujitsu, NEC, Nokia and Samsung.
Now with the growth of cloud-native 5G infrastructure, AMD is combining its fourth-generation EPYC server chips with the Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. The Xilinx chips are already being used in centralized units (CU) and distributed units (DU), as well as other RAN infrastructure.
A little more than a year after the merger closed, AMD introduced two new radio chips at Mobile World Congress (MWC) this year. The ZU63DR and ZU64DR radio frequency systems on a chip (RFSOC), which will start to be produced in the second quarter of this year.
Garcia noted that AMD is planning to add more artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning features into their next generation of radio chips. These will arrive in 2025, he expected.
Also at MWC, Nokia said that they were using AMD’s fourth-generation EPYC processor in their 5G DU, Garcia said. While Mavenir announced that they were using the EPYC in its 5G packet core.
Unlike many of its rivals in the vRAN game, AMD isn’t devoted to either the x86 or ARM processor architecture for 5G workloads, The company can offer customers either architecture, thanks to the Xilinx acquisition.
"AMD has the x86 license so we are focused on the x86, [but] we are using ARM in all the classic Xilinx devices,” Garcia explained. “We are customer-driven, so if for applications the ARM is becoming more prevalent for a specific workload, we don’t have a religion per se.” Garcia said.
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