Cray-2 was finally released after six years of development it was only marginally faster than the X-MP, largely due to very fast and large main memory, and thus it sold in much smaller numbers. The Cray-2 ran at 250 MHz with a very deep pipeline, making it harder to write code than for the shorter-pipe X-MP. As the Cray-3 project started, he found himself once again being "bothered" too much with day-to-day tasks. In order to concentrate on design, Cray left the CEO position of Cray Research in 1980 to become an independent contractor. In 1988 he moved the Cray 3 project from Chippewa Falls to a laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 1989 Cray was faced with a repeat of history when the Cray-3 started to run into difficulties. An upgrade of the X-MP using high-speed memory from the Cray-2 was under development and seemed to be making real progress, and once again management was faced with two projects and limited budgets. They eventually decided to take the safer route, releasing the new design as the Cray Y-MP. Cray Computer Corporation Cray decided to spin off the Colorado Springs laboratory to form Cray Computer Corporation. This new entity took the Cray-3 project with them. The 500 MHz Cray-3 proved to be Cray's second major failure. In order to provide the tenfold increase in performance that he always demanded of his newest machines, Cray decided that the machine would have to be built using gallium arsenide semiconductors. In the past Cray had always avoided using anything even near the state of the art, preferring to use well-known solutions and designing a fast machine based on them. In this case, Cray was developing every part of the machine, even the chips inside it. Nevertheless, the team were able to get the machine working and delivered their first example to NCAR on 24 May 1993. The machine was still essentially a prototype, and the company was using the installation to debug the design. By this time a number of massively parallel machines were coming into the market at price/performance ratios the Cray-3 could not touch. Cray responded through "brute force", starting design of the Cray-4 which would run at 1 GHz and outpower these machines, regardless of price. In 1995 there had been no further sales of the Cray-3, and the ending of the Cold War made it unlikely anyone would buy