The US Department of Commerce has confirmed that Apple Computer Inc’s new G4 professional desktop systems exceed the speed allowed under federal export restrictions for shipping high performance computers to unfriendly countries. Officials at the Department say that Intel’s fastest chips are about 10% slower than the Motorola PowerPC 7400 used in the G4.
Apple has been boasting about the new restrictions in its US television adverts for the new machines, but following complaints from the rest of the industry (and from Apple itself), the Commerce Department eased the restrictions at the beginning of August. It’s the third revision since President Clinton came to office in 1993.
Tier 2 countries (South America apart from Brazil, South Korea, ASEAN, Slovenia and South Africa still require individual licenses above 20,000 MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second). Tier 3 countries (India, Pakistan, Israel, China, Russia and 44 other countries can now buy systems of up to 6500 MTOPS for the military (up from 2000) and up to 12,300 for civilian end-users (up from 7,000). Civilian end users can already take advantage of the changes, but the military must wait until the beginning of next year.
A ten-company group, the Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports, was formed back in March to lobby Congress and the Clinton administration to raise the supercomputer export curbs. Pentium III Xeon servers, the group pointed out, were already exceeding the 2,000-MTOPS limit, and later this year or early next faster clock speed Pentium III single-chip PCs would also have exceeded it. Apple – along with Compaq Computer Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Intel Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc – was a member of the coalition.
