Responding to intense industry criticism, the Commerce Department is reworking proposed Federal rules that would ease export restrictions on high-performance computers to Western allies, agency officials said. The new version, they said, would for the first time take account of foreign competition.
Industry executives have challenged the proposed changes, saying they do not go far enough in addressing the realities of the rapid increase in performance in the computer industry. At the center of the controversy is the sharp advance in computing power created by inexpensive microprocessor chips. Industry executives point out that even desktop systems based on these chips will soon match the performance of many of today's supercomputers.
The new rules as proposed in January would have replaced controls on supercomputer exports that now restrict the export of computers capable of speeds above 150 million floating-point operations per second, or Mflops. (A floating-point operation is a single mathematical operation like addition or subtraction.) The proposed changes would have created a three-tier structure of restrictions ranging from 100 to 300 Mflops.
The shift would have freed a number of makers of high-performance computers from stringent controls that the Government now imposes on foreign buyers. Such controls can include post-delivery inspections, control of software and in individual cases special government-to-government agreements.
The computer industry had countered the proposed regulations by offering an indexing plan that would take into account the rapid improvement in computer speed. But Commerce officials now say they believe an entirely new set of guidelines that take into account the fastest available machines made by foreign competitors is needed to permit United States companies to keep up. They said the proposed guidelines would be reworked in the next several weeks.
The officials also said that while attention had been focused on Japanese computer makers in the supercomputer and high-performance markets, Western European computer makers offered a more immediate threat to United States vendors.
''The real issue for these companies is Western Europe and there is a tremendous competitiveness there,'' said Dennis Kloske the Under Secretary of Commerce for export administration. ''An industry can be amputated at the knees by an arbitrary ruling such as this from officials in Washington.''
New Competition Expected
United States computer industry executives said they expect new competition from European computer makers. ''We're expecting high-performance machines from both West Germany and France,'' said Terry L. Rock, senior vice president of the Convex Computer Corporation, a maker of mini-supercomputers based in Richardson, Tex. ''Both of them want to compete in the supercomputer arena.'' Mr. Rock said Convex's most popular machines now range in speed between 100 and 200 Mflops. All of them would have been affected by the proposed export-control rules.
Commerce officials said they have learned that a number of computers are available from both Western European and Warsaw Pact computer makers that exceed the proposed limits. For example, Meiko Scientific Ltd. of Bristol, England, a maker of a parallel supercomputer using an advanced British microprocessor known as a Transputer, is already selling a computer capable of 300 Mflops. American supercomputer experts also testified at the hearings that they had seen a parallel supercomputer manufactured in Bulgaria that was capable of speeds of up to 100 Mflops.
One danger in enforcing strict performance standards on United States computer makers is that they will move offshore to produce their most powerful systems to escape export controls, Mr. Kloske said. He said Intel officials had suggested that they would manufacture a high-performance microprocessor called the i860 in Singapore and Malaysia.
But Intel officials said they had no plans to manufacture the chip overseas. The i860, which contains special hardware to speed scientific calculations, is capable of speeds up to 65 Mflops, and versions that exceed the 100-Mflop barrier will be available before the end of the year.
Mr. Kloske criticized American regulatory agencies for being out of touch with trends in the computer industry.