Intel doubled down on 5G and edge computing today unveiling a series of chipsets and network adapters that it hopes will pave the way  toward market dominance in 5G silicon.

Taking aim at 5G base stations, the chipmaker unveiled its Atom P5900 CPU, which is based on Intel's 10-nanometer manufacturing process.

"This processor is designed from the ground up to meet the needs of the radio access network (RAN)," said Dan Rodriquez, VP of Intel's network platforms group. "This product was designed with 5G's high-bandwidth and low-latency requirements"

The chip will begin seeing deployments in base stations later this year with Ericsson, ZTE, and a yet to be named launch partner.

Intel sees the processor as a means to gain substantial market share in the base station silicon market.

"Prior to 2015, Intel had no significant market segment share in wireless base stations," said Rodriquez.

And while Intel had projected that it would be the leader in base station silicon by 2022, the chipmaker is now claiming that it will achieve this a year early.

"In addition to delivering standard [system-on-chips] that are built from the group up for the base station market, Intel is delivering a platform foundation that allows our customers to place their unique IP in the silicon from an array of custom silicon solutions," Rodriquez said. "This includes everything from FPGAs [field-programmable gate arrays] to ASICs [application-specific integrated circuits] to structured ASICs."

This includes Intel's first 5G structured ASIC called Diamond Mesa, which the company claims will offer 200% higher performance and 50% lower power consumption compared to the last generation of Intel structured ASICs. The chips are available to early access customers starting today.

Alongside Intel's chip announcements, the company announced the launch of its 700 series network adapters. The new adapters feature hardware-accelerated precision time protocols designed with 5G and other applications that require extremely low latency and timing. Intel is aiming the new adapter at RAN, industrial, and financial services markets.

"As 5G evolves we expect new use cases to emerge that can encompass lengthier time-sensitive solutions from across the spectrum as part of a cost-effective solution," said Rodriquez.

Intel says the new network adapters will be generally available beginning in the second quarter.

Intel also announced several new variants of its second-generation Xeon Scalable data center chips. The new variants will offer higher turbo and base clocks, offering a 36% increase in performance and a 42% cost performance increase when compared to the previous generation of Xeon Scalable chip, which were announced in 2017.

However, Intel has faced increased competition in the data center space in recent months from rivals AMD and IBM Power, while cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) have begun work on their own homebrew Arm processors.