Seymour Cray was a serial inventor at a large and small scale. Having a look at a couple of his patents can be quite enlightening.
Browsing over at the US patent office the earliest found was “US-2741758-A Magnetic core logical circuits. From April 1956“. This patent was to reduce the power consumption and improve reliability of ferrite core magnetic memories. The signal handling circuits were redesigned to remove the need for resistors in the circuitry thus reducing power consumption and heat generation.
See the full document here >> 2741758
A much later patent is “US-5131233-A Gas-liquid forced turbulence cooling. From August 1992″ This patent describes an improved cooling method for dealing with circuits that generate up to 275 watts per cubic inch. The invention describes how cooling can be improved by using both the conduction of heat into a cooling liquid and the boiling of a cooling liquid to extract heat. Previously it had been noticed that the boiling version of cooling both extracts more heat but is subject to hotspots cause by the formation of boiling bubbles on the surface of the chips. The invention combines a turbulent flow of coolant and channels in the substrate to force the displacement of the boiling bubbles that would otherwise stick to the surface causing damaging hot spots. This invention would have been deployed in the design and build of the Cray-3
.
See the full document here 5131233
A favourite patent is the “US-4128880-A Computer vector register processing. From December 1978″ This is the crown jewel that describes the heart of the Cray vector supercomputers. The combined concepts of breaking down an operation into a pipeline, so that the functional units could hold top speed without waiting for operands to arrive from memory, and chaining together operations between functional units before returning an answer. Earlier vector machines existed but the Cray was innovative by acting on groups of registers rather than just sequential memory locations. This central invention allowed the Cray to deliver more results per second than any other computer at the time.
See the full document here. >>> 4128880
See list of other Seymour Cray patents here. See a list of patents held by Cray Research here