"Whistlebower" Dr. Bill Deagle, MD claimed that the unique Gallium Arsenide chip technology that was being worked on by the Cray Computer Corporation essentially became classified by the US Air Force, and that it was developed much further than is publicly known, and that he witnessed a "Cray 5" computing array in operation.
https://youtu.be/tOz0-Hy1rm8?t=462 (7:41)
That guy is bogus. There have been some real cryogenic computing devices, though. IBM and NSA put huge efforts into that back in the 1950s. ("I want a thousand megacycle computer. I'll get you the money" - NSA director).[1] The first generation technology, cyrotrons, sort of worked, but mainstream technologies pulled ahead, and that technology was abandoned in 1965. IBM kept plugging away at cyrogenic computing through the 1980s, with Josephson junctions being the next technology. Those run at liquid helium temperatures. With great difficulty and at huge cost, they got some experimental electronics (not a full CPU) running at 300MHz. By this time, it was 1982, and while that was about 10x faster than the fastest microprocessors of the period, it looked like the upper limit of the technology was around 1GHz. That, plus high cost, plus all the headaches of working in liquid helium, indicated the Josephson junction was a dead end. Standard CMOS was going to outperform the exotic technology. So, in 1983, IBM pulled the plug on that project.
They're trying again.[2] IBM is working on superconducting quantum computing, and has been busy since 2012. Maybe this time it will be useful. It will definitely be expensive.
Seymour Cray, the supercomputer architect, set up a new company, SRC Computers, and started the design of his own massively parallel machine. The new design concentrated on communications and memory performance, the bottleneck that hampered many parallel designs. Design had just started when Cray died suddenly as a result of a car accident.
He died on October 5, 1996 (aged 71) of head and neck injuries suffered on September 22, 1996 in a traffic collision. Another driver tried to pass Cray on Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs, Colorado but struck a third car that then struck Cray's Jeep Cherokee, causing it to roll three times. Cray underwent emergency surgery and remained in the hospital until his death two weeks later. The Jeep Cherokee was designed on a Cray super computer, what a sad coincident. (source "The Superman" book about him)
When he was told that Apple Computer had just bought a Cray to help design the next Apple Macintosh, Cray commented that he had just bought a Macintosh to design the next Cray.
Well, sure. The Cray-5 is in the building next to the Crashed Alien Saucer Hanger at Area 51. Fitting, since Seymour came to Earth in one of them. Also, "whistleblower" is what you use instead of "complete crank" in polite company.
There is a lot of classified work on GaAs for communication links where the speed of demodulating/modulating a signal is critical.
But for general computing, implementation is more critical, consider that the Cray T3E sustained 1 teraflop of computing power, while 3 years ago the Cray-3 could sustain only a meager 16 gigaflops - clearly silicon could deliver performance (and it does so today!).
When you compare the properties of Gallium Arsenide to Silicon chips, it makes a lot of sense that the military would be highly interested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide#Comparison_wit...