Trying to use gallium arsenide was Seymour Cray's fatal last flaw as mentioned at The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997).
The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997) page 4 mentions:
Cray wanted his new machine to employ circuits made from a material called gallium arsenide. Gallium arsenide had achieved limited success, particularly in satellite communications and military electronics. But no one had succeeded with it in anything so complicated as a computer. In the computer industry, engineers had developed a saying: "Gallium arsenide is the technology of the future," they would say. "And it always will be."
It is quite amazing to read through books such as The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997), as it makes you notice that earlier CPUs (all before the 70's) were not made with integrated circuits, but rather smaller pieces glued up on PCBs! E.g. the arithmetic logic unit was actually a discrete component at one point.
The reason for this can also be understood quite clearly by reading books such as Robert Noyce: The Man Behind the Microchip by Leslie Berlin (2006). The first integrated circuits were just too small for this. It was initially unimaginable that a CPU would fit in a single chip! Even just having a very small number of components on a chip was already revolutionary and enough to kick-start the industry. Just imagine how much money any level of integration saved in those early days for production, e.g. as opposed to manually soldering point-to-point constructions. Also the reliability, size an weight gains were amazing. In particular for military and spacial applications originally.
A briefing on semiconductors by Fairchild Semiconductor (1967)
Source. Uploaded by the Computer History Museum. There is value in tutorials written by early pioneers of the field, this is pure gold.
Shows:
- photomasks
- silicon ingots and wafer processing
Intel supercomputer market share from 1993 to 2020
. Source. This graph is shocking, they just took over the entire market! Some good pre-Intel context at The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997), e.g. in those earlier days, custom architectures like Cray's and many others dominated.Some good insights on the earlier history of the industry at: The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997).