[1] Its UTX/32 4.3BSD Berkeley Unix-based operating system was one of the first multi-processor shared memory implementations of Unix, although the processors operated in a Master-Slave configuration with a Mutual Exclusion (MutEx) lock on all manipulations on Kernel tables.
The second processor, called IPU, left all I/O operations to the main CPU.
[1][3] The machine itself was housed in a number of 19 inch rack cabinets and the main CPUs consisted of 18 boards of ECL logic.
The resulting system was capable of benchmark performances up to 10 MIPS, a very high rating at the time.
A smaller model of the PowerNode was also available in the form of the Gould PowerNode 6032 and 6040 single processor systems and 6080 dual CPU which achieved a 7 MIPS performance similar to the contemporary DEC VAX-11/780 and VAX-11/785.