Cray (NASDAQ:CRAY) doesn't sell a lot of supercomputers, but when it does they go for big bucks. Of the $42.14 million in revenue for the first quarter, $28.37 million came from products and $13.77 million came from services.

To put this in perspective,in 2002, the company signed a $93 million contract to install a single "Red Storm" supercomputer to be delivered this year. The system it depends most on for consistent revenue is its X-1, which starts at roughly a million and goes up from there. But they are custom-built, so prices vary widely.

Revenue for the quarter was $2 million less than a year earlier (a drop of 5%). Cray produced a net loss of $3.8 million, or $0.05 a share, compared to a profit of $1.2 million, or $0.02 a share, last year. But obviously, with such high-dollar, high-margin products, these numbers can vary widely from quarter to quarter.

The company says it doesn't expect to make its sales goals for this year because of shortfalls in the first half. It does expect sales to pick up in the second half when it releases two new products, but that won't be in time to make up the difference from the first quarter.

It's likely that there is some pent-up demand for the company's new systems to be released in the second half of the year. Cray has confirmed an order for another "Red Storm" and says that by the end of the year it will have the strongest product portfolio in the industry. There's little doubt about this with so few competitors in its specialty. IBM (NYSE:IBM), Sun Microsystems (NYSE:SUNW), and Silicon Graphics (NYSE:SGI) are its primary rivals.

Still, Cray is the name most people think of when they think of supercharged computing. Its computers are used in a wide variety of applications such as meteorology, car design, scientific research, and numerous government and military applications. And the number of applications and distribution channels appears to be growing.

What effects can you expect Cray's new products to have on the company? Talk about it on the Cray discussion board.

Fool contributor Mark Mahorney doesn't own shares of the companies mentioned.