[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 57 (Wednesday, May 10, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3835-S3837]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. REID (for himself, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Daschle, Mr. Kerry, 
        Mrs. Murray, Mr. Bingaman, Mr. Kennedy, Mrs. Boxer, Mr. 
        Abraham, and Mr. Grams):
  S. 2539. A bill to amend the National Defense Authorization Act for 
Fiscal

[[Page S3836]]

Year 1998 with respect to export controls on high performance 
computers; to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.


   national defense authorization act for fiscal year 1998 amendments

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a bipartisan bill 
that is critical to maintaining our nation's lead in the high-tech 
sector. In specific, this bill is crucial to the computer industry. 
This is an issue that I have been very interested in for quite some 
time, and in particular, have done a lot of work on this session.
  I first want to talk a little bit about the U.S. computer industry. 
According to an article in Computers Today, dated July 19, 1998, 
American computer technology has led the world since the first 
commercial electronic computer was deployed at the University of 
Pennsylvania in 1946.
  This industry is constantly changing with new companies and new 
products emerging every day. A statistic that I find fascinating is 
that more than 75 percent of the revenues of computer companies come 
from products that did not exist two years before. That statistic is 
from the CSPP Freedom to Grow.
  Through research and development, another issue I strongly favor, the 
computer industry has been able to remain competitive for all of these 
years.
  The challenge that we not face, and frankly a challenge that we 
haven't lived up to in the past as a Congress, is to allow our export 
control policies to change with the times, and not to overly restrict 
our nation's computer companies.
  We need to stop trying to control technology that is readily 
available, as we are doing today. The technology that we are regulating 
is readily available from many foreign companies. Companies from 
countries like China and other Tier 3 countries.
  I remember, not too long ago, I was able to secure funding for a 
Super-Computer for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. That computer, 
which required its own room, is now about as powerful as a laptop 
computer. That is exactly the kind of computer that we are still 
regulating.
  Computers that are now considered Super-Computers operate at more 
than one million MTOPS, or about 500 times the current level of 
regulation.
  The bottom line is that by placing artificially low limits on the 
level of technology that can be exported, we may be denying market 
realities and could very quickly cripple America's global 
competitiveness for this vital industry. If Congress doesn't act 
quickly, we will substantially disadvantage American companies in an 
extremely competitive global market.
  Mr. President. On February 1, 2000, at my urging, and the urging of 
others in this body, President Clinton proposed changes to the United 
States export controls on high-performance computers. Since that 
accouncement, the President's proposal has been floating around 
Congress for a mandated 180 days, or six month, review period. When the 
President made his proposal, the new levels would have been sufficient, 
however, we are still regulating under the old levels, and therfore 
hindering American companies from competing in Tier 3 countries with 
other foreign companies.
  The bill that I am offering today simply reduces the congressional 
review period from 180 days to 30 days to complement the 
administration's easing of export restrictions, by amending the 
National Defense Authorization Act of 1998.
  I appreciate the recent bipartisan support of this bill and I look 
forward to debating this bill on the Senate floor in the near future.
  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, today Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and I 
are introducing bipartisan legislation with respect to the review 
period for the sale of high-performance computers. Both Senator Reid 
and I were hoping this legislation would not be necessary. We had 
planned it as an amendment to the Export Administration Act, but that 
act, for a variety of reasons, has been stalled here on the floor, and 
the issue is so important that we don't want to let it die. We are 
introducing this legislation in order to keep the issue alive and, if 
necessary, to provide a vehicle for producing the review that we think 
is necessary.
  Let me display a chart that demonstrates what is happening in the 
high-tech world of business computers. These are not the computers that 
we carry back and forth on the planes. You and I, as we fly back to our 
homes, have laptops and those laptops have amazing capabilities in them 
and represent the changes that are occurring in the computer world.
  If I can be personal for just a moment, at one point in my career, I 
was the head of a company that was grandly called the American Computer 
Corporation. We produced, among other products, a computer that was 
about the size of a washing machine. We were very proud of it. It had 
10 megabytes of hard disc memory in it, and it sold for about $35,000. 
It was literally built in a garage, and we sold every single one we 
could make.
  Today, I have in my hand a computer that costs less than $500, which 
has far more power and capacity than that old machine we were so proud 
of, with its 10 megabytes of hard disc. The laptop I carry with me back 
and forth between here and Utah has more computing power in it today 
than the computers that controlled the space shuttle.
  I have been down to Cape Canaveral to the Kennedy Space Center. I 
have seen the space shuttle. The space shuttle computers that control 
the flight of that at this time are very highly technical instruments 
and are built throughout the entire airplane. They take up so much room 
that they are part of the superstructure of the airplane itself. Today, 
there is more computing power in the laptop that I carry than there is 
in that whole airplane.
  This is a manifestation of what the people in the computer world call 
Moore's law. Mr. Moore was one of the first CEOs of Intel. He 
propounded over 20 years ago Moore's law which says that every 18 
months, the power of computers doubles for the same price; so that 
every 18 months, the computer that you had 18 months ago is now 
obsolete and the new one is twice as fast. Then, 18 months later the 
new one will be twice as fast as that one was. And 18 months later, the 
next new one will be twice as fast, and so on. Moore's law has held for 
over 20 years. Every 18 months the power of the computer doubles.
  Moore's law doesn't hold anymore--not because the power of the 
computer is not doubling but because the power of the computer is 
doubling in less than 18 months. It is doubling faster than Moore 
projected in Moore's law.
  This chart demonstrates what is happening in the world with what we 
call ``business computers.'' These are computers that are roughly the 
size of that old computer we produced that was the size of a washing 
machine, or a college refrigerator. Only now, these computers have the 
power and capacity that we used to think of in terms of the giant 
supercomputers that would fill this room.
  Thereby hangs the issue that has caused me and Senator Reid to join 
together and introduce this piece of legislation.
  When supercomputers, the huge machines that could do an enormous 
amount of computation work, were first invented, it was a matter of 
national security that they be kept out of the hands of America's 
enemies. So it was established by legislation that there would be a 
limit on the size of computers that could be exported because we wanted 
to make sure the supercomputers stayed in American hands.
  The limit that was placed on supercomputers was at the level of 8,000 
MTOPS. I don't mean to be overly technical here, but we need to 
understand what we are talking about. MTOPS is an acronym for millions 
of theoretical operations per second.
  How many theoretical operations or calculations can the computer 
perform in a second? How many millions can it perform in a second?
  At the time this legislation was put in place, it said anything over 
8 trillion theoretical operations per second constituted a 
supercomputer, and therefore it had to be protected from export. It had 
to be held in the United States, for national security purposes. We 
were the only country in the world that had a computer that could 
approach 8 trillion MTOPS, or millions of theoretical operations per 
second.
  That was then. This is now.
  I hold in my hand a device that is produced here in America by Intel 
that

[[Page S3837]]

contains eight chips. And therein lies the tale that I want to talk 
about today.
  Just think of this. This, by the way, retails for about $900. It is 
part of the mother board of a traditional business computer today. The 
mother board is about 2 feet square. This fits on the mother board with 
all of the other chips that are in it. But this is the controller of 
all of that. And it has in it eight tiny chips.

  Here is the marketplace for this kind of computer worldwide. We have 
the figures.
  In 1997, worldwide, it is a little over 2 million.
  You see in the blue down below is the market in the United States, 
and the green is overseas. You can see that the market overseas is 
bigger than the market in the United States.
  The chart marches on with projections made by the Gartner Group out 
of Connecticut to the year 2002. We see, roughly speaking, that in that 
5-year period--from 1997 to 2002--this market will quadruple. We are 
talking hundreds of billions of dollars per year of market.
  I want that understood as the matrix of what we are talking about 
here.
  This is the size of the market for a product of which this is the 
heart.
  Now let's talk about it in terms of export control on MTOPS.
  I hope we can tie all of these together. I realize this is a little 
technical. But understand when the legislation was passed, anything 
that had more than 8,000 MTOPS in it could not be exported, and 
therefore could not be sold in the green part of that bar.
  Let's look at what is happening as Moore's law becomes obsolete as 
the power of computers increases more rapidly.
  Here is a blowup of this device as it existed in 1999, less than 6 
months ago.
  A Pentium III chip carries with it 1,283 MTOPS. So if you had one of 
these with one Pentium III chip in it, you could export it. If you put 
two Pentium chips in it, you could export it because it doubles to 
2,383. If you put four Pentium chips in it, doubling it again, you went 
to 4,584. But when you doubled that by putting eight chips in it, it 
cannot be exported now because it is over 8,000 MTOPS.
  In 1999, this was a product that could be purchased in the United 
States by anybody, carried out the door, or installed, if you are 
buying it for your business, by the people who are providing for you. 
But it cannot be sold overseas without a review of the export license. 
Because we were so anxious to make sure that these computers didn't get 
into the wrong hands, the export license time for review of this was 
180 days, or 6 months. That meant that an American manufacturer who 
took one of these processors from Intel, put eight chips in it, and put 
it in his computer, could sell it anywhere he wanted to in America but 
could not export it for 180 days.
  What happened in that 180 days while he was waiting for export 
approval?
  Let's look at where we are now in the year 2000.
  In that 180-day period where you are waiting for export approval, the 
Itamium chip has been developed and come on the market. It has 6,131 
MTOPS in one chip. If you are going to export this product, you can 
only have one chip in it. If you put two in it, you are immediately 
close to 12,000 MTOPS. If you put in four, you are at 23,000 MTOPS. 
And, if you put in the standard eight that this carries, you are at 
47,000 MTOPS.
  The administration has proposed raising the 8,000 MTOPS level to 
25,000, which clearly doesn't do you any good. The technology is moving 
so rapidly that you can buy 25,000 just as quickly as you can buy 
8,000.
  This is where we are today.
  If you had applied for an export license with Pentium chips last year 
and waited 67 months, by the time you got your 6-month approval, you 
would be facing this kind of competition, and no one would want your 
Pentium chip. They would want one with the Itamium chip. You say, all 
right. I will put up with the 6 months, and I will apply for this 
computer with eight Itamium 2000 chips.
  What is ahead of you if you do that? Looking ahead to 2001 with the 
Itamium 2001 chip, this is what you are facing. That chip will do 9,198 
MTOPS all by itself. Even one chip in this one makes it illegal to 
export without waiting 180 days for approval. Go to the normal eight 
chips, and you are at 70,000 MTOPS.

  To those who say: Good heavens, we are exporting or allowing people 
to buy supercomputers that can do all of the command and control 
decisions for an entire defense system, we are in terrible trouble, we 
are giving away our secrets; I say in the Defense Department we still 
have supercomputers that are currently running at the rate of 2 million 
MTOPS. For those supercomputers, these things are child's play. By the 
time we get to 70,000 MTOPS in a computer of the kind in my hand, the 
supercomputers will have gone up from 2 million to as high as 30 
million. That is the speed with which all of this is happening.
  What are we proposing in this legislation? Simply this: We are saying 
approval can be granted within 30 days. We are taking it from 6 months 
down to 1.
  Why do I pick 30 days, along with Senator Reid? We look at the export 
controls--which, again, are there to protect America's secrets--and we 
find that 30 days is currently the timeframe for an F-16. If a foreign 
government wants to buy our most sophisticated aircraft, we take 30 
days to determine whether or not that particular aircraft in the hands 
of that particular government produces some kind of threat to national 
security. Yet we will take 6 months to decide whether that government 
can buy a computer that is available in virtually every technology 
center anywhere in the United States. They can buy it in the United 
States, throw it on the airplane, and take it abroad themselves.
  Somebody could say: Gee, that is illegal to take abroad. What kind of 
secrecy and control is it when one can buy it on the street in the 
United States, any citizen can buy it as easily as they could buy one 
of these, but for some reason we can't allow them to export it?
  There is another factor to recognize. We are not operating in a 
vacuum. There are Japanese companies that can do this. There are French 
companies that can do this. There are German companies that can can do 
this. If we say American companies can't do this, we just guarantee the 
rest of the world will get this market. Remember those lines on that 
bar chart showing the foreign market is bigger than the American 
market? We are guaranteeing the rest of the world will take this market 
away from the United States as we sit here with our 180-day review 
period, saying in effect no American company can get into this business 
at all, because in that 180-day period everyone overseas will have 
bought foreign and not bought American.
  It is vitally important that we recognize the reality of what is 
happening in the computer world, we bring the date necessary for review 
down to a reasonable period of time, and we say, if you want to buy one 
of these from Intel with eight Itanium 2001 chips in it, it will not 
take any more time for you to do that than it will take you to buy an 
F-16. That is the reasonable, intelligent thing to do. That is what the 
legislation of Senator Reid and myself seeks to establish.
  I hope it is not necessary for our bill ever to be considered or 
passed. I hope the export administration bill comes back on the floor 
and Senator Reid and I can offer our bill as an amendment to that bill 
and see it adopted by the Senate and sent to the President as rapidly 
as possible. Just in case that does not happen, by introducing this 
bill on behalf of Senator Reid and myself today, I am making clear we 
have a backup somewhere in the legislative channel to which we can turn 
to try to make it logical and possible for American computer 
manufacturers and American chip manufacturers to continue America's 
leadership in this market.
  Make no mistake, we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars where 
America currently has the technological leadership in the world. That 
leadership is now threatened by Government regulations. It is 
imperative we change those regulations on the floor of the Senate, if 
possible, working with the administration.
                                 ______