Nokia Predicts 6G Will Need Nvidia's Powerful GPUs

Nokia has announced that it believes 6G will require the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from Nvidia, but not everyone agrees. According to Pallavi Mahajan, Nokia's chief technology officer, GPUs will provide a hardware foundation able to withstand anything 6G throws at it for a long time.

Nvidia's chips are fundamentally optimized for highly parallel processing and can execute highly parallel workloads very quickly, making them ideal for computationally demanding tasks. However, the challenge is cramming enough data into a GPU's hungry mouth to make system-wide use of them look economical, as more data equals more throughput, which risks increasing system latency.

Nokia claims that using GPUs will double spectral efficiency by 2028, but rival Ericsson has expressed skepticism about this claim. Ericsson's head of RAN compute, Michael Begley, explained that AI models in the RAN must be limited to tens of thousands of parameters due to the transmission time interval (TTI), which is a constraint outside the data center.