BESM-6 (, short for Большая электронно-счётная машина, i.e. 'Large Electronic Calculating Machine') was a Soviet electronic computer of the BESM series.
Overview
The BESM-6 was the most well-known and influential model of the series designed at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering. The design was completed in 1965. Production started in 1968 and continued for the following 19 years.[5]
Like its BESM-3 and BESM-4 predecessors, the original BESM-6 was transistor-based (however, the version used in the 1980s as a component of the Elbrus supercomputer was built with integrated circuits). The machine's 48-bit processor ran at 10 MHz clock speed and featured two instruction pipelines, separate for the control and arithmetic units, and a data cache of sixteen 48-bit words. The system achieved a performance of 1 MIPS. The CDC 6600, a common Western supercomputer when the BESM-6 was released, achieved about 2 MIPS.
The system memory was word-addressable