Intel's Xeon chipsets usually belong in server rooms, tasked with doing a lots of heavy lifting. The company's latest chipset, however, the Xeon D-2100 is a bit different, and designed as a CPU for scalable solutions. As such, it is better put to use in the network edge, as Intel puts it, and less so in traditional data centres. 

The company has tipped the Xeon D-2100 for use by network operators and cloud service providers, als boasting that it can help "continuously grow performance and capacity without increasing power consumption". 

With the race to deliver a solid and stable 5G infrastructure the next big concern for major network providers, it seems like Intel has positioned the Xeon D-2100 as the processor to help achieve that. 

"To seize 5G and new cloud and network opportunities, service providers need to optimise their data centre and edge infrastructures to meet the growing demands of bandwidth-hungry end users and their smart and connected devices," comments Sandra Rivera, SVP and GM of the Network Platforms Group at Intel. 

As far as actual specifications go, the Intel Xeon D-2100 houses up to 18 Skylake-server gen processor cores, which is paired with the company's QuickAssist technology, touting up to 100 Gbps of native cryptography, decryption and encryption acceleration. 

At this stage Intel has not released pricing for the Xeon D-2100, nor local release dates.