BARCELONA — Intel kicked off its presence at this year’s Mobile World Congress here by announcing the system-on-chip (SOC) version of its latest-generation Xeon 6 processors, offering mobile network operators a number of benefits over previous generations.

The Xeon 6 SOC adds greater vRAN capacity. It introduces onboard Ethernet controllers, media acceleration, and AI acceleration capabilities to the chipmaker’s high-end edge computing option, all part of a drive to make the case for a CPU-only model at the edge of operators’ networks.

The company touts Xeon 6 SOC as having more than twice the vRAN (virtualized radio access networks, the networking technology carriers use to connect mobile devices to their network) compared to previous generations. It gets an additional boost from the ability to optimize vRAN through AI. Add in a 70 percent improvement in performance per watt, and the chipmaker feels it’s making a compelling case for carriers regarding the total cost of ownership.

“It was very important to reduce the TCO by having the ability to scale all the way to 72 cores in a single rack,” said Cristina Rodriguez, vice president and general manager for Intel’s communications solutions group. “Before, where they needed two servers, now, they only need one. That’s a significant cost saving for them.”

At its booth here at MWC, the company is offering a series of demos that show off the new SOC and its benefits for media and AI applications. Xeon 6 SOC offers up to 14x the media transcoding capabilities of previous offerings, and the addition of AI acceleration sets up the new Xeons for various edge applications. A demo here shows a workplace AI-based inference system for monitoring compliance with workplace safety requirements, specifically whether staff wear required safety vests. The application runs entirely at the edge.

“From my point of view, when you’re at the edge, at the RAN, the type of things you want to do, you can do with the CPU, and keep the complexity and the cost down,” Rodriguez said.

The “keep it on the CPU” message is a key one for Intel, as it seeks to fortify against the mainstream AI strategy of throwing GPUs at AI-heavy applications. Rodriguez called the Xeon 6 SOC a “game-changer” for developing confidence among carriers in the company’s CPU-heavy approach to the edge.