Ericsson and AMD will jointly explore the combination of AMD EPYC processors and T2 Telco accelerator
Ericsson has partnered with AMD to further the development of its Open RAN and cloud RAN ecosystem. According to the companies, the collaboration will result in additional processing technologies in Ericsson’s offerings, providing communications service providers (CSPs) with enhanced performance, more secure high-capacity solutions and more flexibility for open architecture offerings.
Specifically, the pair will explore the combination of AMD EPYC processors and T2 Telco accelerator and investigate future platform generations of these technologies.
“Our work with AMD is a great example of our efforts to expand our support and add more choices for our customers looking to advance their cloud RAN and Open RAN journey,” commented Freddie Södergren, head of technology and strategy for networks at Ericsson. “Adding this technical partner furthers our commitment to enable Ericsson Cloud RAN to run on multiple platforms, delivering a truly cloud-agnostic platform that provides the highest performance required for delivering 5G connectivity and beyond.”
Partnership priorities include increasing customer choice of processing and accelerator technologies, explained Kumaran Siva, corporate vice president of strategic business development at AMD. This goal aligns well with the key driver behind Open RAN and cloud RAN architectures of expanding the ecosystem with new partners and technologies.
Ericsson first announced its Cloud RAN offering in 2020. Since then, the vendor has incrementally launched new Cloud RAN capabilities, a strategy that Per Narvinger, head of product area networks at Ericsson, explained to RCR Wireless News three years ago. This incremental approach, he said, allows customers to add new capabilities as a complement to their existing purpose-built 5G networks. This, Narvinger added, will give them the time needed to prepare for the “technically challenging” journey of virtualization.
“Our customers have been deploying 5G and in one way that is very valuable. You can leverage it for traditional mobile broadband traffic, but at the same time, explore new use cases. And one way to make that more flexible is to bring in the cloud paradigm,” he said at the time.
