Those disappointing figures, and the problems with the Cray-3 (CI No 1,044) were good – or rather bad – for an $8.875 plunge in Cray Research Inc shares to $59.875 on Tuesday, and the company revealed that it also had had problems with the first Y-MP, shipped to the NASA Ames Air Force base in California. It appears the Y-MP problem – of chip crashes – has now been solved, but some circuits had to be redesigned and replaced. Cray this quarter embarks on its biggest ever shipment programme, intending to install 27 new machines, including four Y-MPs, by the end of the year. Its previous biggest quarter involved putting in 19 machines. The two $20m Y-MPs to go out next month are destined for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The company also revealed that the $10m in additional costs for the Cray-3 broke down to $6m for scrapping Gallium Arsenide chips that threatened to burn up and designing new ones, $4m in unexpected additional costs for fitting out the old Inmos International plant in Colorado Springs to make the Cray-3. John Rollwagen says the Cray-3 will ship sometime in 1990, but designer Seymour still says it will be ready by late in 1989. Cray also says that if its share price remains weak, it will start buying in its own shares under the 3m buy-back programme already authorised by the board.
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