LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic Universe-Document

LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic

June 13, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 4; Page 5; Column 1; Week in Review Desk

LENGTH: 988 words

HEADLINE: The World: Letting the Chips Fall Where They May;
High-Tech Exports Hit Antiquated Speed Bumps

BYLINE: By DAVID E. SANGER

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

BODY:
BAD news for Chinese generals: The United States Commerce Department has just determined that the new Sony Playstation II, available later this year, is powered by an American-made chip so powerful that Washington would have to be notified before it could be shipped to China. If the final destination were a company, institute or household linked to the Chinese military, a lengthy review would be required to make sure America's most sophisticated technology does not fall into the hands of bomb makers.

But any Chinese officer determined to play out his fantasies on a state-of-the-art Sony -- perhaps simulating a naval attack to retake Taiwan? -- has other options. He could simply send his teen-agers over to shop at any of the five Toys "R" Us stores in Hong Kong, which is still considered a safe place to send advanced technology even though it reverted to China two years ago. The issue of the Playstation is bandied about a lot in Washington these days as one more example of how disconnected the politics of controlling high-tech exports is from the realities of a marketplace that reinvents itself every six months. In the wake of the disclosures about Chinese espionage, there has been daily talk on Capitol Hill about crackdowns on the export of American technology, not only nuclear secrets from the labs, which everyone agrees must be locked up, but also the computing power that would help the Chinese simulate nuclear explosions.

The Playstation is only the tip of the chip. Over the next 12 months American computer and semiconductor makers are planning to roll out a series of new products, with code names like Willamette and Merced, that blow wildly past the limits Washington has used to define a supercomputer that needs to be guarded. By year's end, says Andrew S. Grove, chairman of the Intel Corporation, "You'll be spending $1,200 at CompUSA for a computer that, if the rules aren't changed, we may not be able to ship to China." Or to Israel, Russia, India or 50 other nations subject to strict controls.

This leaves the Clinton Administration in a bind. Just as it is defending itself against charges of letting technology out the door, the computer industry's top executives were visiting Capitol Hill and the White House last week asking for a relaxation of the export rules. Under their proposal, the definition of a high-performance computer requiring Government approval for export to those 50 countries would be increased sixfold to 12,300 MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second) from 2,000 now. Otherwise, they warn, Europe and Japan will eat their lunch.

Many in the Clinton Administration agree that the current limits are too strict given today's technology. The President could ease the restrictions with a stroke of his pen, but he must give Congress six months to review the decision. Nowadays, though, one White House official lamented, "We'd be giving ammo to anyone who believes that we are helping arm potential enemies."

What the computer industry seeks is a fundamental rethinking of what kind of technology it makes sense to control. During the cold war that issue seemed relatively straightforward: the most powerful Cray supercomputers and their Japanese rivals were clearly off-limits for shipments to the likes of the old Soviet Union and China. But Crays were produced in limited numbers, and when they were sold to countries whose intentions might be less than honorable, part of the deal was that they would be accompanied by a full-time technical expert who, in theory, also served as a monitor.

But the motto of last week's Silicon Valley visitors, who included some big donors to Democratic and Republican causes, is that "Yesterday's supercomputer is today's laptop." They have a point: a $20 million Cray X-MP, state of the art in the mid-1980's, had about the power of a 1999 personal computer equipped with a relatively fast version of Intel's Pentium II chip.

That Pentium is, of course, passe. By the end of this year Intel projects that a high-end Pentium III chip will perform 1,600 MTOPS, well above the current limit for microprocessors that can be shipped to China and similar countries. Then comes Willamette and Merced, chips that Dell, Compaq and I.B.M. and others plan to put in clusters of two or four in forthcoming machines. These computers would operate at upwards of 12,000 MTOPS, or more than six times the current threshold for export controls.

"The fact is that there are going to be millions of these computers produced," said Lewis E. Platt, the president and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, who led the lobbying effort here. "There comes a moment when a technology is so widely available that the kind of limits that we put in place just a few years ago simply don't make any sense anymore."

The two main authors of the report on China's espionage efforts, Representatives Christopher Cox, a California Republican, and Norm Dicks, a Washington Democrat, sympathize but insist it is time to revive the cold war organization that limited exports, the Committee on Multilateral Export Controls. It went out of business in 1994, replaced by a weak accord that allows most countries to ship whatever they want.

"Export controls remain essential because even as China has stolen some of our most important secrets, it has not yet obtained everything it needs to exploit them," Mr. Cox and Mr. Dicks wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. Europe and Japan, however, see the threat differently; they worry more about America's technological supremacy than about what happens when China gets the Merced. They are reluctant to re-institute cold-war controls.

That's understandable. The Gartner Group, a computer industry consulting group, projects that within three years the Chinese will be buying nearly 400,000 multi-processor personal computers a year, to say nothing of Sony Playstations.
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GRAPHIC: Drawing. (Stuart Goldenberg)

LOAD-DATE: June 13, 1999