Intel announced a new line of chips today called Xeon D, and they encompass the latest and greatest that Intel has to offer in the way of technology. Technology so advanced, in fact, that Intel hopes that it will be integral in enabling robots to handle more complex manufacturing tasks.

While the Xeon D line was created mainly with servers and network appliances in mind, Intel obviously has far loftier goals in mind. As it stands, Xeon server chips already occupy a majority of the hardware in data centers, but the Xeon D line is the first server chip from Intel based on the Broadwell architecture. The product itself isn’t actually one chip per se, but two pieces of silicon sharing a common housing; the goal being to create one device that could contain nearly everything needed for a complete server node in one compact footprint. In keeping with this mission, Xeon D processors will sport TDP ratings from “under 20W” to 45W, falling far below the levels where the larger Xeon EP chips top out. And as if all that weren’t enough to set the new Xeon D line apart from the crowd, the new chips actually come with features that could benefit the advancement of robot use.

Susceptibility to hacking and assurance of reliability are obviously two big issues when considering robot design and implementation. To help combat that, the new Xeon line has on-chip security to protect from hackers as well as high-reliability features onboard to eliminate as much threat of failure as is possible. One such example is the process of optical inspection, a quality control process often used in manufacturing and packaging. You take any product, scan and analyze it against a database, and any unit that appears defective or doesn’t match the established design gets flagged. With Xeon D chips, robots will be able to perform Internet of Things tasks such as this by connecting to cloud services for the needed information while the stronger on-board processing allows them to better analyze the data. Basically, more computing power means more options – more complex algorithms and faster, more advanced means of completing tasks.

With the announcement just having come today, there is little in the way of confirmed pricing or specs just yet. What we do know for sure is that the Xeon D-1450 will have eight cores with a base clock of 2.0GHz, an all-core Turbo peak of 2.5GHz and a single-core Turbo peak of 2.6GHz. The D-1520 will feature a 2.2 GHz base frequency, 2.5GHz all-core Turbo and a 2.6GHz single-core peak. Each of the eight cores is outfitted with Xeon reliability enhancements and a dedicated 1.5 MB L3 caches per core. All combined, the new features mean you get 14nm processors that easily triple the speed of top devices currently offered by companies like Applied Micro, one of the leading ARM server CPU makers on the market. Assuming the Xeon D line performs as planned, it is poised to ship in the largest numbers we’ve seen in a very long time once the market comes to have a better understanding of it.