Close on the heels of Intel’s earlier this month launch of an updated lineup of its mainstream and budget chips with new Core i5 and i3 offerings, chip market rival AMD has recently announced a low-power quad-core chip, the Phenom II X4 910e; over and above its new dual-core champ, the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition.

Using only about half the power of higher-clocked CPUs, including the 125-watt version of the Phenom II X4 965, the newly-announced Phenom II X4 910e boasts a core clock speed of 2.6GHz, and has shown satisfactory performance in the lab tests.

In the synthetic PCMark Vantage test, the almost $169-priced Phenom II X4 910e scored 6,471; marginally beating the company’s high-end flagship Phenom II X4 965 which scored 6,409.

The Sony Vegas 8 MPEG-2 video-rendering test witnessed the Phenom II X4 910e turn in a decent score of 4 minutes and 5 seconds; slightly less than but the Core i5-661’s score of 4 minutes. Furthermore, the Windows Media Encoder 9 test had the Phenom II X4 910e score 3 minutes 31 seconds, as against the 3 minutes and 3 seconds score of the Core i5-661.

Meanwhile, AMD, which is also launching five new middle and lower range desktop CPUs of its own, is renaming the quad-core Athlon II X4 620 as the Athlon II X4 630, to accommodate the new CPUs.