In an attempt to recapture the server market from Advanced Micro Devices, Intel Corp announced Monday its new quad-core chips that consume just 50W of power while providing performance of four processing engines.

Intel Xeon processors L5320 and the L5310 have four processing cores, 1.86GHz and 1.6GHz clock-speeds respectively, 8MB L2 cache in total and are compatible with LGA771 infrastructure that supports 1066MHz processor system bus. Thermal design power of the new chip is just 50W, which is significantly lower compared to the company’s previous quad-core offerings that had thermal design power of 80W or 120W.

The price of the Xeon processors L5310 (1.60GHz) and L5320 (1.86GHz) is $455 and $519 in 1000-unit quantities, which is more expensive compared to chips at the same clock-speed, but with higher power consumption. For example, Intel Xeon E5320 (1.86GHz) is sold for $455 too, but has 80W TDP instead of 50W of the new microprocessors.

Intel has been promising to make low-power quad-core server chips available in Q1 2007 for several quarters now, therefore, no surprise that many of leading server makers and suppliers, including Acer, Dell, Digital Henge, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, HCL Enterprise, IBM, Rackable Systems, Samsung, Verari Systems and Wipro Technologies, plan to start offering low-power quad-core Intel Xeon-based machines right away.

Low-power chips with four processing engines are aimed mostly at datacenters that use dual-processor blade machines and which are looking forward to increase their computing power without increasing their electricity bills and installing advanced cooling systems.

Broad lineup of quad-core microprocessors, currently Intel offers eleven of such chips for desktops and servers, also helps the world’s largest chipmaker to fight its smaller rival AMD, who does not sell quad-core chips today, but promises to start shipments in the second half of 2007.