Unlike the Cray systems, the iPSC is designed to be used as a multiprocessor rather than as a multicomputer, and vectorization is not as critical an issue.

The iPSC/860 provided 32 processors, each with a small, 8 megabyte, local memory. There was no shared memory, and processors communicated by passing messages. This new machine featured 8 megabytes of memory per node, with a peak speed of 1.9 gigaflops.