The radiation-hardening of the original RSC 1.1 million-transistor processor to make the RAD6000's CPU was done by IBM Federal Systems Division working with the Air Force Research Laboratory.

[citation needed] As of June 2008[update], there are 200 RAD6000 processors in space on a variety of NASA, United States Department of Defense and commercial spacecraft, including: The computer has a maximum clock rate of 33 MHz and a processing speed of about 35 MIPS.

[2] A typical real-time operating system running on NASA's RAD6000 installations is VxWorks.

The Flight boards in the above systems have switchable clock rates of 2.5, 5, 10, or 20 MHz.

Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general commercial market in 1996.