[sinxccc]

I don't have access behind the paywall. But from the title, if it is only telecom carriers devices, basically RISC-V and ARM chips.

Telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE use their own network processor on data plane for a long time, replacing control plane CPU (usually x86 or ARM) is not a big task. Smaller companies who relies on Broadcom solution may have a tough time, but 3 years to find a replacement and finish adaptation is not that hard too.

[nsteel]

Big Chinese carriers like China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom rely on networking gear from Cisco, Nokia, Ericcson etc alongside Huawei, just like European/US carriers do/used to. All those vendors are going to feel losing this market.

Personally, I think 3 years to change the hardware at the heart of your product is a huge ask. Although of course it depends on the quality of the replacement.

[tuetuopay]

I think you’re underestimating the CPUs in such telco devices. Even datacenter grade equipment (much easier on the control plane than telco or backbone) come with Xeon chips. Not the best ones, but still full blown server CPUs with heaps of RAM.

This is not Arm or risc-v territory (yet), perhaps Ampere devices. However this is approachable by Loongsoon an I’d bet it’s the path they’ll take.

[nsteel]

I've always understood it that datacentre equipment comes with beefier control plane processors then telco equipment. And that's for three main reasons. Firstly, the data planes themselves are less powerful and have to offload more to the CPU. Secondly, the thermal env of telco will cook a Xeon. Thirdly, SDN and extensible Linux-based software is more popular in datacente, compared to mostly proprietary telco software where the CPU has a fixed house-keeping role. Cavium's arm/mips processors were popular for telco control plane.

It's quite possible my viewpoint is outdated.