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Copyright 1999 Times Mirror Company
Los Angeles Times
March 17, 1999, Wednesday,
Home Edition
SECTION: Business; Part C; Page 3; Financial Desk
LENGTH: 539 words
HEADLINE: TECHNOLOGY;
COMPUTER FIRMS PUSH FOR RELAXING EXPORT CURBS;
TECHNOLOGY: THE INDUSTRY COMPLAINS TO LAWMAKERS OVER 'OUTDATED' RESTRICTIONS.
BYLINE: JUBE SHIVER Jr., TIMES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
Silicon Valley executives asked federal lawmakers Tuesday to ease U.S. export
restrictions that could soon lock American computer manufacturers out of the
booming Chinese market.
The U.S. restricts the sale of so-called supercomputers to China, Iraq, North
Korea, India, Russia and about three dozen other nations in an effort to thwart
the spread of nuclear weapons. Enacted a few years ago when most computers
weren't as powerful as they are now, the law requires American companies to get
government authorization before they can export supercomputers.
Today's personal computers are approaching the speed and power of
supercomputers of just a few years ago.
The export issue is coming to a head because Intel Corp. and some other
computer chip makers are set to begin mass marketing billions of dollars worth
of microprocessors that are too powerful to be sold to China, Russia, India and
other restricted countries.
Calling the export rules
"outdated," Dan Hoydysh, a Unisys Corp. executive who serves as co-chairman of the
Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports, told members of the Senate Banking
Committee on Tuesday,
"We must face the fact that yesterday's supercomputer has become today's laptop."
Hoydysh's comments drew some support from R. Roger Majak, the Clinton
administration's assistant secretary for export administration. He told the
Senate panel that
"the diffusion of technology around the world means that many controlled
products are
widely available."
The Capitol Hill showdown over
export controls comes as a coalition of
computer companies, including Intel, International Business Machines Corp., Dell
Computer Corp. and Apple Computer Corp., stepped up their campaign to persuade
federal lawmakers to ease export laws that Congress tightened about a year ago.
Intel spokesman Bill Calder said the company derives about 60% of its revenue
from overseas sales. But he said the overseas market for Intel microprocessors
depends on the ability of the giant chip maker to get its most sophisticated
products to customers without delay. Otherwise, Calder said, they will turn to
European or Asian competitors that do not face similar constraints.
To bolster its lobbying efforts, the industry coalition released a study
Tuesday that claimed foreign competition to U.S. PC makers is growing and that
eight major PC makers overseas already make high-speed
computer equipment whose performance exceeds the U.S.
export control threshold of 2,000 million theoretical operations per second, or MTOPS.
A single Intel Pentium III chip performs nearly 1,200 MTOPS. When two or more
such chips are packaged on a single PC circuit board, the computing power can
exceed the control threshold.
The coalition's report estimates that foreign manufacturers this year will sell
nearly 800,000 computers that have computing power greater than the export
restrictions.
But the coalition could be in for a cold reception from Republicans who view
their hard line against China as a way of dramatizing a foreign policy
distinction with the White House.
The Clinton administration has been criticized by several members of Congress
for its alleged lax supervision of
high-tech transfers to China.
LOAD-DATE: March 17, 1999