Page "Central processing unit" Paragraph 14

Transistor-based computers had several distinct advantages over their predecessors.

Aside from facilitating increased reliability and lower power consumption, transistors also allowed CPUs to operate at much higher speeds because of the short switching time of a transistor in comparison to a tube or relay.

Thanks to both the increased reliability as well as the dramatically increased speed of the switching elements ( which were almost exclusively transistors by this time ), CPU clock rates in the tens of megahertz were obtained during this period.

Additionally while discrete transistor and IC CPUs were in heavy usage, new high-performance designs like SIMD ( Single Instruction Multiple Data ) vector processors began to appear.

These early experimental designs later gave rise to the era of specialized supercomputers like those made by Cray Inc.