Intel missed the boat on mobile, and it may be facing a fight from ARM-based chips in the data center, but the chip giant isn’t going to sit back and lick its wounds. It is actively reaching out to the burgeoning maker and connected device crowd with development boards, it launched a new chip designed for the internet of things and it purchased an API management company. It is also going after a less sexy but still large market that seems ripe for some x86 chips — telecommunications.

Intel wants its chips inside the switches, routers and base stations that are the workhorses of the telecommunications network, even if it means making some sacrifices. To meet telecom’s requirements it will have to partner with another chip firm to get the right kind of processing power for base stations and change its focus from integrating everything into one chipset into a more modular system-on-a-chip model. In a conversation with Rose Schooler, the GM of Intel’s Communications Infrastructure Division, we discussed the chip firms plans for what it sees as a $16 billion market opportunity, why the telco market is ripe for disruption and what Intel has learned from its previous (and abandoned) forays into this market.

But first, let’s talk about why this is even an opportunity for Intel. Today, the telco market has a big problem in that people love its products (especially wireless data) but the cost of meeting that demand is too high. One reason for such high costs is the type of equipment telcos purchase. The concept of “five-nines reliability” (available up to 99.999 percent of the time) and telco-grade gear have created a booming business for expensive boxes that handle much of the telecommunications industry’s needs. The dominant chips in this market are PowerPC or proprietary network processing chips from networking gear vendors.

But much like the server industry in the 1990s, when Intel saw an opportunity to move its PC chips upmarket, the telco world looks ready for a cheaper, good-enough chip as long as it can meet certain minimum specs. Already telcos are trying to consolidate their hardware (it’s not uncommon to see telecommunications providers have their internal IT, their IP video equipment and their cloud services all on three different platforms) on a common infrastructure to offer them more agility.

As this transition happens, Intel (as well as ARM) is trying to offer an architecture onto which telcos can consolidate. When you add in newer trends such as software-defined networking, the telecommunications industry is at an inflection point that all kinds of gear makers are trying to adapt to. Intel wants to be in on that, and has for a long time.

“This isn’t a strategy that started when SDN started to get attention,” Schooler said. “We’ve been on this journey for a decade. We’ve been looking at the evolution for the IA [Intel architecture] franchise within communications and redefined networking to boil it down into all of the infrastructure and workloads that support a network function.”

By: DocMemory
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