Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced that it will have a new, low-power Opteron processor to its Shanghai line roadmap, to be released in the second quarter of the year. AMD said the need to build lower-power chips is driven by the rise of computing cloud centers.

AMD has launched five new 45nm quad-core Opteron HE (high-efficient) processors, whose distinctive feature is that they are lower power – 55 watts as opposed to 75 watts for the full power versions.

Microsoft said it will use AMD’s Opteron chip for its cloud computing initiative — Windows Azure Compute Service. The new chips are available immediately on servers from Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Rackable Systems. Servers using these chips will be available from other vendors this quarter, including Dell, IBM and Sun Microsystems.