Nvidia adds Arm support to its 5G kit, and a 16-core BlueField DPU to speed up edge, HPC

Nvidia has decided to bet on both Arm and x86 platforms for the 5G edge, with a new data processing unit – aka SmartNIC – that packs 16 Arm cores. The forthcoming BlueField-3 will include 16 Arm Cortex-A78 CPU cores, as well as 16 acceleration cores with 256 execution threads, but will be happy working inside Intel-powered or …

[JetSetJim]

> Just why the 5G edge needs AI wasn't explained to The Register.

Variety of use cases available in the real-time optimisation category that vendors are happy to say are "AI enabled" to make them sound more modern and cutting edge.

Plus the posibility of deploying a model to be trained/tested/validated on bits of the network without having to backhaul loads of data to a central server (farm).

Options include:

a) radio parameter optimisation (handover thresholds, antenna tilt adjustments)

b) mobile geolocation

c) traffic analysis/prediction

And that's all in the existing traditional fields, which can further expand when you start playing with multi-user-MIMO.

Regular analytical techniques can require a lot of modelling expertise - AI can possibly simplify this, assuming deployed correctly (and no doubt mistakes will be made...)

[Anonymous Coward]

I love that you can pick up old infiniband kit on ebay for super cheap. I got some 56 Gbps cards for $40 each and a 36 port switch for $200 just to play with :D