LiVe LiFe To The FuLLThe world is moving ! Don’t stay behind…

Intel hasn’t yet responded to the last salvo Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) sent its way, but AMD is already back to take another whack at the world’s biggest chip maker.

A month after it launched its last round of consumer desktop microprocessors, AMD is launching five new microprocessors for consumer desktop computers.

The newest chips use AMD’s 45-nanometer manufacturing process and carry the AMD Phenom II brand name. Two of the chips have three computing brains, or cores, on a single chip, while the other three have four cores each.

The new chips mean that AMD is hitting its stride with the 45-nm process as the technology spreads throughout the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company’s mainstream product line. The prior chips launched in January consumed a lot of power — 125 watts — and had a lot of performance. But the new ones consume less power at 95 watts and are still pretty fast.

It remains to be seen if this one-two punch at Intel will result in any shift in market share. AMD has been losing money for more than two years and the recession is taking its toll on PC sales. The company lost $1.4 billion in the fourth quarter and is laying off 1,100, or 10 percent, of its employees. AMD is hoping that consumers will become more value conscious and opt for its cheaper chips over Intel’s brand name.

The chips range in performance from 2.5 gigahertz to 2.8 gigahertz. Prices range from $145 to $175. David Schwarzbach, a product marketing director at AMD, says the company will continue to upgrade to faster speeds throughout the year since the current chip design has a lot of headroom.

Ha, and you thought a 3DMark06 score of 5,086 was intense when AMD’s Phenom II was overclocked to a blistering 3.85GHz. Just after CES, a team of hardcore speed freaks with access to liquid nitrogen and liquid helium created an environment for OC’ing one of AMD’s latest Phenom II X4 chips in -232 degrees Celsius weather. Once the silicon was appropriately chilled, they proceeded to push the clock speed to a staggering 6.5GHz, which proved nimble enough to deliver a patently absurd 45,474 3DMark05 score. The best part? The adoring public was there to bear witness, and every nail-biting second of it is hosted up in the video just past the break.

The tennis match continues. Advanced Micro Devices and Intel are in a duel for the top performance in microprocessors. Today, AMD is taking a swing with the launch of its new series of server processors for high-end computers and Internet servers.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD is launching two new families of Opteron server chips. The HE series are low-power versions (dissipating 55 watts) that can be used in power efficient computers. And the new high-performance SE series, which dissipates 105 watts, will be used in the highest-performance servers and workstations.

Last November, AMD launched its first 45-nanometer Opteron chips based on the Shanghai design. That means the circuits are 45 billionths of a meter in width. Intel moved to 45-nanometer chips earlier than AMD, so AMD has to make this transition just to keep up with Intel. The initial AMD dissipated 75 watts, while the HE series and SE series Opteron chips are the latest derivatives. The low-power chips have a feature where the chp shuts down circuits that are not in use to go into a low-power state.

The HE chips run at 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 gigahertz, while the SE chips run as high as 2.8 gigahertz. The previous fastest chip ran at 2.7 gigahertz. Hewlett-Packard will launch new servers this week with the new Opteron chips, said John Fruehe, AMD’s director of product marketing for the server and workstation division. AMD has been shipping since the start of the month and customers are stocked with supplies.

Intel’s lowest power Xeon server processor is the Xeon i5420. The Intel chips run as high as 3.2 gigahertz, but the AMD chips are essentially just as fast, despite maxing out at 2.8 gigahertz. That’s because the AMD chips can get more work done during the tick of a clock than an Intel chip, Fruehe said. The SE chips range in price from $1,165 to $2,659. The HE chips range from $316 to $1,514.

The new server chips will make AMD competitive against the best of Intel’s line-up. But it remains to be seen if that’s going to help AMD, which has lost money for nine quarters in a row, get back to profitability.