Several thousand VAX 7xx-series computers were running scientific and engineering applications., and before the Cray XMP was introduced, only one Cray 1 was available at a university.
With the emergence of the Cray XMP in 1983, the performance, capacity, and cost-effectiveness of supercomputers was increased by factors of 1.5, 6, and 3, respectively.
The range of results is comparable with an analysis of Titan and the Cray XMP by Misak and Lue at the Institute of Supercomputer Research [8] where for scalar and vector loops, the Cray was faster by about a factor of 5 and 10, respectively.