Nvidia Aerial 5G Platform extends support for Arm

Nvidia used the Mobile World Congress to announce that it is extending support for Arm-based CPUs in the Nvidia Aerial A100 AI-on-5G platform, in a move that’s intended to bring more choice to the 5G ecosystem.

According to Nvidia, this will help businesses to deploy intelligent services at the edge by enabling OEMs to offer industry-standard servers running highly efficient Arm-based CPUs and Nvidia AI Enterprise software with Aerial 5G.

These Nvidia-Certified Systems will be able to create a simplified path to building and deploying self-hosted vRAN that converges AI and 5G capabilities across private enterprises, network equipment companies, software makers and telecommunications services providers.

The Aerial A100 AI-on-5G computing platform uses the Nvidia Aerial software development kit and will incorporate 16 Arm Cortex-A78 processors into the Nvidia BlueField-3 A100. This results in a self-contained, converged card that delivers enterprise edge AI applications over cloud-native 5G vRAN with improved performance per watt and faster time to deployment.

“We’re bringing together two worlds – AI of computing and 5G of telecommunications – to create a software-defined platform for AI on 5G,” said Ronnie Vasishta, senior vice president of Telecom at Nvidia. “Now supporting Arm, our growing Aerial platform is accelerating AI-on-5G everywhere.”

BlueField-3 A100 includes Nvidia’s extensive AI software library and Aerial 5G SDK, which speeds time to deployment and will support an array of ultra-low-latency enterprise AI projects, including precision robots, automated guided vehicles and digital twins for product development and manufacturing.

Nvidia AI Enterprise provides compatibility for a broad set of accelerated CUDA applications, AI frameworks, pre-trained models and software development kits running in the hybrid cloud. Optimisations enable workloads to scale across multiple nodes to support large deep learning training models with full GPU virtualization.

BlueField-3 A100 can be deployed both with x86 and Arm-based CPUs and by offering the choice of Arm technology with BlueField-3 A100, companies and network operators will be able to deploy software-defined 5G base stations and AI applications.

BlueField-3 is a next-generation data processing unit built for AI and accelerated computing, that is intended to help companies deliver AI applications with industry-leading performance and data center security. It is optimised for 5G connectivity, multi-tenant, cloud-native environments, offering software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management services at the edge.