Energy-Efficient Chip by A.M.D. delay again

AMD will be forced to delay the ramp of its Barcelona server processor after running into a bug, the company has confirmed.

Barcelona, AMD's first quad-core processor for servers, is shipping to some customers in the high-performance computing market. But the company had hoped to start shipping it to a wider variety of customers this month, as well as introduce a faster model that could better compete with Intel's latest Penryn chips.

The energy-efficient chip that Advanced Micro Devices was counting to win customers away from Intel has been delayed again, the company said yesterday.

The company confirmed that a technical irregularity has delayed widespread availability of its Barcelona chip for servers until early next year. The company had announced in September that it was beginning to ship it to customers.

Technical problems, called errata, are common during chip development, and both A.M.D. and Intel have been plagued by them at various times. The significance of this glitch — in rare instances, the chip could fail to function — has more to do with Barcelona’s further delay than with the glitch itself. The product was originally set for general availability in the middle of 2007.

“We’re continuing to ship it but only to specific customers,” said John Taylor, spokesman for A.M.D., which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. As a result, many server manufacturers have not been able to sell the products they expected based on the new chip.

At the time of Barcelona’s release in September, A.M.D. executives described the processor as one of A.M.D.’s most significant new products in several years. A.M.D.’s first quad-core processor, Barcelona features four processors on one piece of silicon, allowing faster calculating and greater energy efficiency at companies running large data centers and server farms.

After months of delays, the new processor arrived as A.M.D. was struggling to maintain its hard-earned gains from Intel, its far larger rival, and just a week after Intel announced a new version of its own chip for servers, Xeon.

A.M.D. is offering Barcelona customers a workaround that allows them to use the chip until the errata are addressed in a new version of the product in January. The problem also affected the company’s Phenom processor, a desktop version of the chip, but A.M.D.’s workaround solution for that was issued before the product shipped, Mr. Taylor said.

Nathan Brookwood, a chip analyst with Insight64, said that it was not unusual for this kind of problem to appear and that he expected the impact on Barcelona customers to be minimal compared with past errata.

“The effect on customers using the patch will be they lose some performance,” Mr. Brookwood said. “But it won’t force A.M.D. to retrench.”

Dirk Meyer, president of A.M.D., hinted at a problem during a conference call with analysts in October, saying that initial production of Barcelona had been slower than expected. But he insisted that the product would be widely available by November. Company officials said yesterday that the scope of the problem had not become evident until after that call.

Face book - New advertising system sparked with privacy complaints

In a blog post, the 23-year-old founder of the social networking site apologized Wednesday for privacy violations by its controversial Beacon advertising program, which broadcasts users' online purchases to friends in their networks. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will add a Beacon opt-out button to the site's privacy settings, caving to the demands of a protest group created by MoveOn.org called "Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!"

Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook Inc. has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies.
Under the changes outlined late Thursday, Facebook's 55 million users will be given greater control over whether they want to participate in a three-week-old program that circulates potentially sensitive information about their online purchases and other activities.

Facebook provided two different opportunities to block the details from being shared, but many users said they never saw the "opt-out" notices before they disappeared from the screen.

With the reforms, Facebook promised its users will now have to give their explicit consent, or "opt-in," before any information is passed along.

The concessions were made after more than 50,000 Facebook users signed an online petition blasting the system, called "Beacon," as a galling intrusion that put the Palo Alto-based startup's pursuit of profit ahead of its members' privacy interests.

More than 40 different Web sites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster.com, had embedded Beacon in their pages to track transactions made by Facebook users.

Unless instructed otherwise, the participating sites alerted Facebook, which then notified a user's friends within the social network about items that had been bought or products that had been reviewed.

Facebook thought the marketing feeds would help its users keep their friends better informed about their interests while also serving as "trusted referrals" that would help drive more sales to the sites using the Beacon system.

But thousands of Facebook users viewed the Beacon referrals as a betrayal of trust. Critics blasted the advertising tool as an unwelcome nuisance with flimsy privacy protections that had already exasperated and embarrassed some users.

Some users have already complained about inadvertently finding out about gifts bought for them for Christmas and Hanukkah after Beacon shared information from Overstock.com. Other users say they were unnerved when they discovered their friends had found out what movies they were watching through purchases made on Fandango.

If Facebook adheres to the new "opt-in" standard, "it would be a significant step in the right direction," said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org, which launched the petition drive to revamp Beacon just nine days ago. "It also says a lot about the ability of Internet user to band together to make a difference."

The backlash against Beacon illustrated the delicate balancing act that Facebook must negotiate as the company tries to cash in on its popularity without alienating the users fueling its success.

Beacon is a key component in Facebook's "Social Ads" program, which is vying to make more money from the rapidly growing audience that uses the social network's free services as a place to flirt, gossip and share personal passions.

Privately held Facebook already is believed to generate more than $150 million in annual revenue after just three years in business, but it's under pressure to accelerate its growth.

Microsoft Corp. raised the stakes last month by paying $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake. The investment valued Facebook at $15 billion — an assessment that will require the company to become a lot more profitable in the next few years.

Skeptics have questioned Facebook's market value, given the company's brief existence and the inexperience of its 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who started the social network in 2004 while he was still a Harvard University student.

This isn't the first time that Facebook has done an about-face after introducing a feature that raised privacy concerns. Last year, Facebook rolled out a "news feeds" tool that tracked changes to users' profiles. After thousands of users rebelled, Zuckerberg issued a contrite apology and added a way to turn off the news feeds.

This time around, a customer support representative expressed Facebook's regrets in a Wednesday night note that foreshadowed the changes made Thursday.

"We're sorry if we spoiled some of your holiday gift-giving plans," Facebook's Paul Janzer wrote in a posting addressed to Beacon's critics. "We are really trying to provide you with new meaningful ways, like Beacon, to help you connect and share information with your friends." Janzer also acknowledged Beacon "can be kind of confusing."

Zuckerberg, whose stake in Facebook is worth $3 billion, thought Beacon's referral system would be seen as friendly product endorsements that generated more sales than traditional advertising. He hailed the distribution of peer recommendations as advertising's "holy grail" when Beacon was introduced earlier this month.

But Beacon may lose some of its luster with the tougher privacy controls. That's because fewer people typically participate in services with opt-in provisions.