Intel is announcing today a trio of new low-power Atom microprocessors for enterprise hardware. The company made the announcements as part of its Intel Developer Forum event in Beijing today. The new chips show the company is serious about moving low-power processing technology into the heart of the data center.

The three new Atom chips are code-named Briarwood, Avoton, and Rangeley, Lisa Graff, VP and general manager of the Datacenter Marketing Group, said in a press call. The Briarwood chip, formally dubbed the Intel Atom Processor S12x9, will be used in storage applications. It can provide up to 40 lanes of input-output PCIe 2.0 capacity and other features for storage devices. That chip is available now.

The Avoton and Rangeley processors will be out in the second half of 2013. Avoton is a second-generation 64-bit system on a chip that uses Intel’s most advanced manufacturing process, the 22-nanometer technology with a microarchitecture dubbed Silvermont. Avoton will be targeted at micro servers, or low-power versions of enterprise servers that use lots of low-power cores rather than a small number of brainiac cores. That chip is available in samples now. Rangeley will be used in networking devices, including mid-range routers, switches, and security appliances.

Yesterday, Hewlett-Packard, which is perhaps Intel’s biggest customer, launched an Atom-based HP Moonshot server family. Those servers will use the Intel Atom S1200 processor family. HP will introduce that family of servers in the second half of the year.

In the long run, Intel’s goal is to enable technologies that will lead to the creation of smarter cities, healthier communities, and thriving businesses, according to Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. Worldwide, global datacenter traffic will reach 6.6 zettabytes by the end of 2016, according to the Cisco Global Cloud Index. Global Internet protocol traffic will reach 554 exabytes per month. To put that in perspective, mankind created only 5 exabytes of data from the dawn of civilization until 2003.

Intel has also created its own software distribution for Hadoop enterprise software. With it, China Mobile has been able to deliver inquiry results 30 times faster and with great ability to scale capacity in the future.

Intel isn’t ignoring the high-end of the server chip market either. The company will launch its 22-nanometer Xeon processor E5 family in the third quarter. It also has some other chips, dubbed E3 and E3, coming this year. That means Intel will have a complete refresh of its enterprise technology during 2013.

Lastly, Graff said that Intel is launching a Cloud Innovation Center in China to allow developers to test their software on Intel cloud technology so they can get products to market quicker.

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Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Intel is poised to ship its first chips for “microservers,” a hot new category where it has been trailing its rival Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD says that Intel has been playing catch-up, particularly since it bought microserver pioneer SeaMicro for $334 million early this year. But Intel, the world’s biggest chip maker, says it has actually been thinking about microservers — which use Intel’s low-power Atom microprocessors — for a long time. In an interview with VentureBeat, Intel Fellow Matt Adiletta (pictured below) said that he had been contemplating low-power servers since 2006 and he was the point person in getting SeaMicro, an innovative pioneer in microservers, to use Intel Atom chips in its first machines. AMD has also allied with ARM in hopes of outflanking Intel.

In any case, microservers have become one of the most competitive battlegrounds in the multibillion-dollar server chip market. The whole idea is that it is more efficient to use small, highly efficient processors rather than big supercomputing beasts to process huge numbers of small workloads, like the tasks that data centers handle in serving web traffic. Intel is briefing reporters on Wednesday morning about “a new technology for data centers” in San Francisco. That’s where the company is expected to introduce its new code-named Centerton version of the Atom microprocessor for microservers. Another version, code-named Avoton, is coming next year.

AMD is still offering SeaMicro microservers with Intel chips in them. But at some point, it will have its own chips designed for the purpose. In that respect, while AMD can say its SeaMicro is a leader in microserver systems, Intel can rightly say that it is the only company shipping processors designed specifically for microservers today.

And those will likely be based on the low-power ARM architecture that AMD licensed. ARM chief executive Warren East sees microservers as its wedge into the huge data center server microprocessor market that has long been dominated by Intel.

Adiletta faced some skepticism as he built the case for increasing the density of processors so they could be used by the hundreds in a tightly packed server cabinet — without melting down a data center. His idea was the distribute a computing work load across a lot of low-cost servers, which would be better than having beefy servers working on light loads and becoming idle at some point.

Adiletta said he was inspired when former chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger asked him to explore the low-power blade server market, where thin, low-power server cards were used in servers to scale up big data centers.He had a conversation with Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and chairman at Arista Networks. Adiletta also worked with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2009 and started envisioning workloads for an Atom-based microserver.

He was the point man for Intel in winning a deal with SeaMicro. He saw the servers as a way to get rid of cabling, improve infrastructure, and get computing resources online more quickly so they can be used as needed. Microservers are turning out to be great for the era of Big Data and cloud computing. AMD views Intel’s latest efforts as late and its chronicle of Adiletta’s work as an attempt to rewrite history. SeaMicro executives, now at AMD, say that Intel fought SeaMicro on its choice of Intel’s Atom processors.

But Intel has to tread carefully. Intel executives have said that microservers might be 10 percent of the server chip market. But if they grow larger than that, they could cannibalize Intel’s sales of larger, more expensive server chips. And that could hurt Intel’s bottom line.