Seymour Cray began the design of the Cray-3 in 1985, as soon as the Cray-2 reached production. Cray generally set himself the goal of producing new machines with ten times the performance of the previous models. Although the machines did not always meet this goal, this was a useful technique in defining the project and clarifying what sort of process improvements would be needed to meet it. For the Cray-3, he decided to set an even higher performance improvement goal, an increase of 12x over the Cray-2.