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.

During the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project the processing of the space mission telemetry data was accomplished by a new computer complex which was based on a BESM-6.

The Apollo-Soyuz mission's data processing by Soviet scientists finished half an hour earlier than their American colleagues from NASA.

[8] A modification of the BESM-6 based on integrated circuits, with 2-3 times higher performance than the original machine, was produced in the 1980s under the name Elbrus-1K2 as a component of the Elbrus supercomputer.

[9] The BESM-6 could send output to an АЦПУ-128 (Алфавитно-Цифровое Печатающее Устройство) printer, and read input from punched cards in the GOST 10859 character set.