Announced in December 1988,[1] they replaced Fujitsu's earlier FACOM VP Model E Series.
The VP2000 was similar in many ways to their earlier designs, and in turn to the Cray-1, using a register-based vector processor for performance.
For additional performance the vector units supported a special multiply-and-add instruction that could retire two results per clock cycle.
[citation needed] One of the major complaints about the earlier VP series was their limited memory bandwidth—while the machines themselves had excellent performance in the processors, they were often starved for data.
Like most companies, Fujitsu turned to massive parallelism for future machines, and the VP2000 family were not on the market for very long.