Three short notes on industry developments worth tracking this week.
O-RAN ALLIANCE released WG4 specifications v9.0. The big change is in the M-plane management messages — a tightening of the timing-source negotiation that should make multi-vendor RU/DU integration meaningfully easier. We've reviewed the diff against v8.x and the breaking changes are all in the right direction. For anyone running a mixed-vendor pilot, this is the version to start planning a transition to. The official document is gated behind ALLIANCE membership; a public summary is reportedly coming in April.
Qualcomm shipped a public NPU profiler for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Until now, deeper performance work on Qualcomm NPUs required either vendor support or a great deal of patience with synthetic benchmarks. The new profiler is a CLI tool that produces flame-graph-style output for inference passes. Early test on our quantisation pipeline showed it correctly attributing 23% of inference time to a tokeniser path we hadn't realised was running on the CPU side; we expect to spend a couple of weeks rebalancing.
IEEE COMSOC's Edge AI Workshop 2026 call for papers is open. Submission deadline is May 1, with the conference itself in Lisbon in October. The track on edge inference for telecom workloads is particularly worth watching — last year's edition saw the practical-papers ratio move from "mostly slides" to "mostly reproducible benchmarks", which is a healthy sign.
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