Kontron, Napatech, and Truminds Software Systems announced improved performance and energy efficiency for their previously released 5G core solution.
All three partners will discuss the solution in their booths at MWC 2025 in Barcelona from March 3rd through 6th: #5D91 (Kontron), #7B67 (Napatech) and #5H24 (Truminds).
Following the January 2024 announcement of their 5G core solution comprising Truminds’ TruCore packet core software running on Kontron’s ME1310 multi-access Edge server and accelerated by Napatech’s NT200A02 SmartNIC, customer feedback confirmed the need for a higher-performance, more energy-efficient solution targeted at IoT, enterprise, and telecom use cases with large numbers of subscribers and/or devices. The new solution addresses this opportunity by leveraging Napatech’s recently launched NT400D13 SmartNIC, which delivers a system-level performance improvement of up to 60% compared to the original platform.
"As Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and enterprises scale public and private 5G networks, they face increasing demands for handling massive numbers of flows and high-bandwidth traffic," said Roy Chua, Founder and Principal at AvidThink. "By extending and enhancing their 5G core solution, Napatech, Kontron and Truminds are boosting both capacity and performance per server while optimising costs and energy efficiency. This collaboration accelerates real-world 5G adoption, enabling fast and effective deployment of next-generation applications."
“Our ME1310 edge server, powered by the Intel Xeon D-2700 processor, delivers long-term reliability, a wide operating temperature range and a compact form factor – making it the ideal platform for hosting energy-efficient and dependable private wireless networks,” said Charles Fambrough, Director of Global Sales for Connectivity/Telco/Media Platforms at Kontron. “With this next phase of our collaboration with Napatech, we’re enhancing the server’s capabilities, delivering a version that is optimised for business-critical applications like Truminds’ TruCore."
“Truminds’ TruCore is an industry-proven Release 17-compliant 5G packet core that offers Cloud-native 5G functions including UPF, SMF, AMF, AUSF, UDM and UDSF. When combined with Kontron’s mature server technology and Napatech’s innovative SmartNICs, it creates a powerful, cost and energy-efficient solution for public and private networks," said Amitabh Mathur, CEO at Truminds. “Our core network technology solution has been chosen by several leading OEM vendors across the globe and this expanded collaboration further cements our leadership in providing world-class 5G solutions.”
“The User Plane Function (UPF) represents the highest compute workload within the 5G packet core. Since general-purpose server CPUs are not well suited to the required real-time packet processing, Napatech provides a fully offloaded UPF data plane running on our programmable SmartNICs,” said Charlie Ashton, Senior Director of Business Development at Napatech. “The NT400D13 SmartNIC processes up to 185 million concurrent flows, achieving a total throughput of up to 297 million packets per second (stateless operation) and ensuring full 2x 100G wire speed operation. This results in a system-level performance boost of up to 60% compared to the earlier Kontron-Truminds solution based on the NT200A02, as well as a corresponding improvement in energy efficiency.”
