Popular Chinese drone maker DJI Inc. is no longer just targeting hobbyists. The company is touting the Manifold, or in its own words “the most powerful computer designed for drones”, an embedded computer powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A-15 processor.

The Manifold has been designed to sit atop of DJI’s $3,300 Matrice 100 drone. While DJI makes ready-to-use drones like the Phantom 3, the Matrice 100 can be thought of as a “developer’s drone”, as it’s able to be fitted with add-ons like the Manifold and additional cameras or sensors.

With the Matrice 100 series, DJI is looking to promote the creation of various drone-related applications such as in-flight image processing. That kind of capability would be welcome, because in-flight processing would lead to much lower latency when streaming HD imagery over Wi-Fi. In-flight processing would also mean drones can be given greater autonomy in case it loses contact with the operator for any reason.

To do so, the drone needs much greater processing power and that’s where the Manifold comes in. A quick look at the specs and one is reminded of Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (mini PC): 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, four USB ports, an SD-card slot, Ethernet, HDMI and audio. But the Manifold is in fact even more powerful than mini PCs, as it also boasts a 2.2GHz Nvidia Tegra K1 quad-core ARM chip loaded with 192 GPU cores, together with dedicated camera in and out ports, two UART (universal asynchronous receiver-transmitters) connectors and an expansion header that allows access to SPI (serial peripheral interface) and I2C (inter-integrated circuit) control lines.

DJI built the Manifold alongside Linux vendor Canonical Ltd, and that means it runs the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating system. The Manifold also comes with support for Nvidia’s CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), the ROS (Robot Operating System) framework for writing robot software, and APIs for running massively parallel code.

By making so much computing power available to drones, DJI believes it will enable the creation of “new artificial intelligence applications such as computer vision and deep learning.”

“With the Manifold, we are entering a new era of smarter, faster and more powerful aerial platforms. Manifold opens up for aerial and ground technology to intelligently work together to solve complex problems,” said Michael Perry, DJI’s director of strategic partnerships, in a statement. “We are excited to see what applications our developer community will come up with for this new platform.”

The Manifold is available now from DJI’s store priced at $499.