It is Mobile World Congress time, and there will be a lot of talks about the path to commercial 6G. The usual suspects such as Intel, which dominates the core RAN (Radio Access Network) market, together with Ericsson, made a collaborative announcement that includes Intel 18A and Clearwater Forest Xeon 6+. The new Xeon 6+ is up to 60 percent faster in the core RAN network than the Sierra Forest Intel Xeon 6.
Ericsson and Intel announced a collaboration to accelerate the path to commercial AI-native 6G. It aims to help the industry move from 6G research to commercial reality in a matter of a few short years. Many 6G deployments are expected before the end of the decade, and the leaders want to be ready to get the telecoms there.
The AI-native network innovation collaboration aims to span compute, connectivity, cloud, and standards leadership across the core network, RAN, and Edge, as well as AI-driven RAN, packet core, platform-level security, and network capabilities to help enhance ecosystem enablement and time-to-market for cloud-native solutions. The effort is designed to help make the path to 6G more open, efficient, and cost-effective for operators and the broader ecosystem.
Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson, says:
“6G is not merely an iteration of mobile technology. It is the infrastructure that will distribute AI across devices, the edge, and the cloud. Ericsson’s long history of network innovation and large-scale operator deployments positions us to lead practical integration across the value chain and move 6G from research into commercial reality.”
Lip-Bu Tan, CEO, Intel, says:
“Intel’s ambition is to be the undisputed technology leader in unifying RAN, Core, and edge AI to enable a seamless transition to AI-native 6G environments. Together with Ericsson, we will continue to demonstrate that the future of network connectivity is open, power-efficient, secure, and grounded in intelligent AI inference. With future Ericsson Silicon, powered by Intel’s most advanced process nodes, ongoing multi-year research plans, and flexible AI-RAN ready Cloud RAN powered by Intel Xeon, we are well on our way to delivering the future performance, efficiency, and supply security that the world’s leading operators require.”
A shared commitment
It is expected that we will see some sort of commercial 6G before the end of the decade, while research and trials are set to start much earlier. There will be modems supporting the Release 19 5G spec on the device side that will most likely support early 6G, and commercial devices with 5G Release 19 modems are expected by the end of this year.
The Ericsson and Intel collaboration will advance future high-performance and energy-efficient compute architectures designed for both AI for networks and networks for AI. It is natural that AI is taking center stage in 6G talks, as it is expected that agentic and generative AI will drive a lot of traffic in the near future for 5G and 6G networks.
AI-native 6G will combine intelligent and programmable networks with advanced compute and real-time sensing, creating a stronger foundation for more responsive, efficient, and capable services. Over time, that evolution could bring sensing and compute closer together across the network. Ericsson and Intel have collectively achieved important milestones across cloud RAN, 5G Core, and open network infrastructure. Some other 6G newcomers are addressing just one pillar necessary for the whole 5G/6G network, but we will get to that in other parts.
On top of that, Intel announced the Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest Intel 18A 288-core CPU, which offers 60% performance-per-watt improvements in Ericsson trials on the core RAN network.
