SPARCstation IPX

Weitek sold an 80 MHz aftermarket "SPARC POWER μP" (2000A-080 GCD) processor [1] for the IPX, which requires a ROM update to v2.9.

The SPARCstation IPX includes an integrated Sun Turbo GX cgsix color framebuffer[3] on the internal SBus.

[4] The SPARCstation IPX uses an M48T02 battery-backed RTC with RAM chip which handles the real time clock and boot parameter storage.

As all sun4c machines are now older than the battery life of this chip, a substantial number of these systems now refuse to boot.

Additionally, the sun4c design used the reserved bits in the M48T02's NVRAM in a non-standard way; since later revisions of the M48T02 chip exert stricter control over these bits, a current M48T02 will store the NVRAM data, but the RTC will not function correctly and the system may fail to auto-boot.

Due to incompatibilities with modern M48T02s, it is common to modify failed NVRAMs by cutting into the encapsulation and patching in a new battery.