The earlier Cray-3 was the first major application of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing.
The Cray-4 was essentially a shrunk and sped-up version of the Cray-3, consisting of a number of vector processors attached to a fast memory.
A midrange system included 16 processors, 1,024 megawords (8192 MB) of memory and provided 32 gigaflops for $11 million.
Several single processor CRAY-4 prototype systems, each with 64 megawords of memory, were undergoing diagnostic testing prior to the Company filing for bankruptcy.
The Company began testing individual CRAY-4 modules at the start of 1994 and planned to be able to deliver a 4-processor CRAY-4 prototype system by approximately the end of the second quarter of 1995.