Intel veep slags power hungry GPUs
He said they are not suitable for many RAN sites
This will be one of the pressing worries of AI RAN
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2025, BARCELONA – The hype cycle around AI-RAN is just getting its wheels in Barcelona, with Nokia favoring Nvidia’s approach of using GPUs for both RAN and AI tasks. Chip rival - and 5G processor provider - Intel, however, unsurprisingly questions if many radio sites will be able to field the power required by Nvidia chips.
“For deployments at the actual RAN sites there is no power,” Intel VP and general manager Alex Quach told Fierce in an interview. He was suggesting that for RAN sites there just isn’t the power available to run energy-intensive GPUs.
Analyst and professional tech cynic Dean Bubley, founder of Disruptive Analysis has recently noted the power requirement issue in a piece on LinkedIn on AI-RAN. “Nothing really changes with AI workloads that means in-network servers and compute magically becomes a huge opportunity. If anything, it's even harder,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, some vendors are chasing that AI-drawn golden goose!
Of course, Quach said that Intel’s latest Xeon 6 RAN processors could do “a lot of inferencing” with the additional processors. In fact, telecom vendors - including Nokia - have just been listed in an Intel release on their latest 5G processors, citing the benefits realized by the processors.
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