Intel and Samsung add to pressure on purpose-built 5G

Intel’s new Granite Rapids processors are starting to land in commercial virtual RAN products, giving general-purpose hardware more weight in a market once dominated by custom 5G chips. As these x86-based platforms improve, the cost and complexity of designing and deploying specialized silicon become harder for vendors to defend.

Samsung is adding to that pressure by pushing its own virtualized and open RAN offerings, signaling less reliance on proprietary, purpose-built baseband gear. Together, Intel’s compute roadmap and Samsung’s network portfolio point in the same direction: operators have more credible options to shift from locked-in, hardware-specific 5G infrastructure toward software running on standard servers.