Intel today revealed a series of new chips and services aimed at advancing capabilities for IoT, including artificial intelligence (AI), security, and improved computing at the edge of networks.

“We’re very excited to launch some edge native or edge informed products and capabilities to truly enable what we believe will be a democratization of these technologies and the unique needs of the market to truly unleash the growth of opportunity at the edge of the network,” John Healy, VP of Intel’s IoT group, said during a press briefing.

Distributed workloads are increasingly gaining momentum, and 5G is a mechanism that will continue to fuel that expansion by bringing more processing and analytics to the point of data capture, allowing for more well-informed decisions to be made at the network edge, he explained.

About 70% of all enterprises will process data at the edge by 2023, according to Intel.

Intel’s new processors tailored for IoT include the 11th generation Intel Core Processor, Intel Atom x6000E Series, and the Intel Pentium and Celeron N and J Series. The chipmaker claims the new products are in response to pervasive IoT challenges around edge complexity, cost, and impacts on the environment.

The 11th generation Intel Core Processor delivers a 23% boost in performance on a single thread, a 19% gain in multi-thread performance, and almost a threefold increase in graphics performance, according to Intel.

The Atom x6000E, and Intel Pentium and Celeron N and J Series, form what Intel claims to be its first processors enhanced specifically for IoT. The chips deliver up to two-times better performance on 3D graphics. More than 100 partners have already committed to use the new suite of products, according to Intel.

All of the new products are being targeted for deployment in industrial applications, transportation, health care, retail, banking, utilities, and hospitality.

Intel also created a new experience for developers with the Edge Software Hub, including Edge Insights for Industrial and the Intel Distribution of the OpenVINO toolkit. Healy described the Edge Software Hub as a portfolio of software designed to help developers improve their apps and make better use of the assets within Intel’s platform.

“It’s a combination of tutorials, code loops, and referenced architectures that allow them to understand how best to optimize for a specific range of applications,” he said. New reference architectures out of the gate include an edge insights suite and edge control suite for industrial applications.

“We've integrated the virtualization layers, and hypervisors, and specific management capabilities to ensure that a control stack can be implemented in a way that provides a very fast, very high performance control environment for those kinds of applications,” Healy said.

Intel said it is also working with more than 1,200 partners to advance edge computing. “Working with our partners, we have more than 15,000 end customer deployments across nearly every industry,” Tom Lantzsch, SVP of IoT, and Dan Rodriguez, corporate VP of Intel’s Network Platforms Group, wrote in a blog post accompanying the news.

Audi is using Intel-based edge analytics and machine learning to eliminate the need for manual inspections of welds and, as a result, has cut labor costs by 30% to 50% while boosting weld inspections at least 100 times with 18 milliseconds of latency, according to Intel.

Some of Intel’s other customers on edge computing include Accenture, Bosch, ExxonMobil, Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), Philips, and Verizon.