Companies—and countries—have been racing to build 5G networks, buying thousands of base stations in a bid to lead the technology arms race. Now, companies that supply the hardware at the heart of these base stations are helping them hit the accelerator.
戴尔已推出了与5G基站的服务器级加速器卡马尔维尔。The accelerator card is based on Marvell's Arm-basedOcteon Fusionprocessor and brings a performance boost to virtual RAN (vRAN) and Open RAN networks.
A base station—also called the radio access network (RAN)—is a set of hardware modules that are usually mounted on poles or buildings and connect smartphones or other devices to a wireless network. The RAN includes a radio unit (RU) that houses radio-frequency (RF) transceivers and other ICs to convert and amplify RF signals. The radio unit is generally located close to or integrated directly into the antennas on a base station.
One of the other key components of a base station is the distributed unit (DU), which houses the baseband processor that runs L1 (or PHY) functions of the RAN protocol stack—or shares the load with the radio unit. The central unit (CU) is located in a telecom's cloud data centers, where it is used to run core management and 5G control functions. These “functional splits” allow for flexible partitioning of workloads in a network.
戴尔said the accelerator can be plugged into the servers it sells to telecom giants, which are generally placed at the base of the pole the antennas and radio are mounted on. The accelerator card uses PCIe Gen 4 lanes to take over more of the real-time baseband and other signal-processing chores such as beamforming and massive MIMO from the server's CPU. In Dell's servers, the CPU is usually an Intel Xeon processor.
开放加速度
By taking over more of the baseband and signal-processing chores from the CPU, the Dell accelerator card runs them more efficiently, saving CPU performance that can be used by telecom firms for other workloads or services. Plugging the accelerator card into the base station also helps reduce the number of CPU cores that telecom companies are forced to buy per 5G base station, potentially cutting the cost of the hardware.
渴望的硬件会导致收音机中的热点热点，这些热点需要笨重，重型的热量限制才能保持凉爽。将电力交付到基站通常是无线网络中最大的运营成本之一。
加速器还支持开放式RAN标准，该标准有望使电信公司的灵活性与许多不同供应商的基站混合和匹配组件。
Ericsson, Huawei Technologies, Nokia, and other telecom equipment giants have long sold base stations in closed and proprietary bundles that combine in-house firmware and software running on custom hardware.
戴尔said the Open RAN accelerator card that it developed with Marvell will be widely available by late 2022. The announcement by Dell and Marvell came ahead of Mobile World Congress (MWC) next month.
HPE Taps Qualcomm
HPEsaid that it has partnered with高通为了根据其服务器和高通公司的5G X100运行加速器卡构建DU解决方案，以支持未来5G网络上的高容量和低延迟工作负载。
HPE表示，它将使用去年在专门为基站设计的新型紧凑型服务器中推出的高通公司的5G X100加速器卡，并使用Intel Interel的数据中心CPU。该设备最多可以支持5G加速器卡中的四张，这些卡可以支持5G网络使用的6-GHz和毫米波频带。高通表示，加速器卡可以通过PCIE端口进入任何行业标准服务器。
加速卡被放置在前面的CPU in the cluster of servers in the bowels of a base station to crunch data traveling from the radio unit directly without intervention from the CPU. As a result, it reduces latency that plagues wireless networks. Offloading beamforming and other baseband chores from the CPU also reduce the power the base station burns through, which, in turn, lowers cooling costs.
HPE通信技术业务副总裁汤姆·克雷格（Tom Craig）表示，该解决方案还将支持Open Ran，它将帮助电信公司解决5G网络的严格且不断变化的需求。
高通and HPE said the accelerator can reduce the cost of operating a 5G base station by up to 60%.
5G无线电加速度
其他人则将加速器直接集成到5G基站（包括无线电）的其他部分的芯片中。
模拟设备is trying to secure a larger slice of the market withits first family of 5G radio SoCs。这些芯片具有宽带RF收发器，带有八个发射和接收通道，可提供400 MHz带宽以及高动态范围。芯片内部的一系列加速器块可以处理数字信号处理作业，例如数字预性（DPD），这些作业用于使用现场可编程的门阵列（FPGA）。
该公司表示，13-W Radioverse Socs非常适合小型细胞（部署在城市中的短距离基站），以及电信公司使用的宏观基站用于拥有数千万用户的庞大网络。
SOC也可以插入开放式运行基站，可以与4G和5G齿轮中许多最受欢迎的RF功率放大器配对，包括具有较高功率密度的GAN功率放大器。
