Arm has been at the forefront of enabling generations of cellular technology. We have worked with the ecosystem for more than 25 years to become the leading CPU architecture of choice for base stations deployed around the world. 5G technology holds tremendous promise towards delivering a connected world well beyond traditional human-to-human connectivity. The orders of magnitude performance improvements in bandwidth, lower latencies, and number of connections with 5G open doors to a broad set of applications. These applications range from immersive experiences, smart cities, industrial IoT, autonomous transport and so many that we have not even thought of yet. Arm with its broad ecosystem is at the core of enabling this transition.
As we see more operators across the world deploying 5G (7220 deployments, 111 operators as of 1Q20*), the industry is coming together to drive innovations in new radio technology, network hierarchies and changes in deployments and supply chains. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) have largely relied on traditional networking OEMs to build, deploy, and maintain the infrastructure to tune the network to meet their subscriber demands. However, new trends open the vendor options for the MNOs:
With over 70% of the world’s population using Arm technology daily, the Arm ecosystem plays a huge role in enabling 5G from endpoints all the way to the cloud with a rich portfolio of solutions to meet the power, performance, and scalability requirements. Arm Neoverse CPUs for the infrastructure market deliver over 40% performance/power advantage over competing alternatives, which helps operators cut operating expenses over the lifetime of their equipment.
But it takes more than best-in-class processors to broadly deploy 5G. Arm works closely with a broad ecosystem of developers and makes significant contributions in more than 100 open-source initiatives including OS, CI/CD, virtualization and cloud native technologies, end to end security and networking software stacks. Arm is already a key player in telco-centric organizations such as Telecom Infra Project, DPDK, fd.io, and Linux Foundation’s Akraino project.
O-RAN alliance is a leading industry forum with a vision of openness and innovation fostered by a broad community of experts. Arm is excited to join O-RAN alliance to drive this vision to reality. Participating in O-RAN accelerates our focus on enabling Telco's and vendors to deploy 5G infrastructure that is open, interoperable, and cloud-native. We offer our extensive set of development tools and ecosystem resources to the community to exploit Arm’s ability to offer high-performing and power-efficient compute solutions that enable 5G infrastructure. Arm with our partners, helps meet the diverse range of computing needs and spans all key areas of 5G deployment—from the roll out of network infrastructure to processors within each device. We are looking forward to the next big steps in this journey to 5G!
To learn more about 5G RAN architectures and Arm design guidelines, read the following whitepaper.
Managing the Future of Cellular
*Stats from Ookla 5G map as of March 15 2020 track.