Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has just announced that it will add a new, low-power Opteron processor to its Shanghai line roadmap, planning to release the chip in the second quarter of the year. In order to explain this decision, the company said the need to build lower-power chips is driven by the rise of computing cloud centers, like the ones built by Microsoft or Google.

In November, AMD launched the first quad-core Opterons, a 75-watt version with speeds of up to 2.7 GHz, built with the 45nm technology. The next processors are a 105-watt, 2.8 GHz chip, designed for high performance and large database users, and a 55-watt version, with speeds of up to 2.3 GHz.

Microsoft also announced that it will use AMD’s Opteron chip for its cloud computing initiative, the company’s Windows Azure Compute Service. AMD will release seven chips with varying capabilities and prices, from $316 TO $2,649. 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.

It looks like the cloud computing segment is really a high-growth one, and that’s why AMD is expecting a large number of sales for low-power chips to increase with the rise of cloud computing as a platform. Lower power, along with a virtualization-optimized processor, fits cloud computing environments looking to save as much on energy consumption as possible. It remains to be seen if these new processors will have the desired success in this emerging market.