Like its predecessor, the Cray J90, the SV1 used CMOS processors, which lowered the cost of the system, and allowed the computer to be air-cooled.
The SV1 was backwards compatible with J90 and Y-MP software, and ran the same UNIX-derived UNICOS operating system.
Later variants of the SV1, the SV1e and SV1ex, ran at 500 MHz, the latter also having faster memory and support for the SSD-I Solid-State Storage Device.
Multiple SV1 cabinets could be clustered together using the GigaRing I/O channel, which also provided connection to HIPPI, FDDI, ATM, Ethernet and SCSI devices for network, disk, and tape services.
In theory, up to 32 nodes could be clustered together, offering up to one teraflops in theoretical peak performance.