The FPGA N3000 programmable acceleration card. Source: IntelIntel Corp. has introduced a field-programmable card array (FPGA) programmable acceleration card designed to enable 5G next-generation core and virtualized radio access network solutions.
The announcement was made at Mobile World Congress 2019 held Feb. 25-28 in Barcelona, Spain. The N3000 FPGA card accelerates virtualized workloads ranging from 5G radio access networks to core network applications.
The card is a highly customizable platform for high bandwidth and low latency applications, allowing for optimization of data performance to achieve lower costs while maintaining a high degree of flexibility, Intel said. The card can accelerate network traffic for up to 100 Gbps and supports up to 9 GB double data rate 4 (DDR4) and 144 MB quad data rate (QDR) IV memory.
Intel has already signed up a pair of providers to use the card in 5G solutions. One of them, Affirmed Networks, is offering virtualized cloud-native mobile networks for 5G. Using the N3000, Affirmed Networks developed a new solution for 5G core network/evolved packet core for a 200 Gbps/server. The card provided lower power consumption and lower latency for the 5G network while it managed smart load balancing and central processing unit (CPU) cache optimizations.
Rakuten, an e-commerce and financial technology maker, is using the N3000 card as the distributed unit accelerator next to Intel Xeon Scalable processor where Layer 1 functions, such as forward error correction and front haul transmission, are offloaded onto the FPGA. The card accelerates processing efficiency to improve and support user capacity, as well as reduce system cost and improve security in the radio network.
