Is it possible LSI made a sparc processor?

[FDIV]

I took apart a very strange looking Sun system today. It was called the Model 547. What I found inside was quite odd. It had a sun media GX graphics system and plenty of ram and cache. However, beside the cache where the processor should be were two LSI chips like the one below. There were also some other LSI chips that appeared to be the cache controllers. I thought this was all very strange as I expected to find a processor in this otherwise complete computer and I expected that processor would probably be some type of sparc. What do you all think?

Thanks,
Les

[jrmunro]

Is this the board it came from?

501-1733 motherboard FAB 270-1733-12 (SPARCstation 10)
PROCESSOR: MBus modules
ARCHITECTURE: sun4m
FPU: -
MMU: -
MEMORY: 8 SIMM slots for up to 512M
CACHE: -
EXTERNAL BUS: none
BUS: SBus @ 18/20MHz, four slots, 28 address bits
MBus, two slots
POWER: ?

LAYOUT: From left to right with component side up and external
connector edge toward you, the external connectors are:
ISDN NT and TE connectors; a parallel connector above an
audio/AUI Ethernet connector; a keyboard/mouse
connector; a serial port connector (ports A and B in the
same connector); a 10BaseT Ethernet connector; and a
HD50 SCSI connector.

The boot PROM is in the near right at location U1005.
The NVRAM/TOD/ID chip is beyond the boot PROM, at
location U1004. The power connector is in the far left
corner and the floppy and internal SCSI connector is in
the far right corner. The speaker fuse F1302, Ethernet
fuse F1301, and keyboard fuse F0801 are in a row along
the middle near edge. The SCSI fuse F1502 is in the far
right corner near the internal SCSI connector. The +12V
fuse F1501 is in the middle left edge. All fuses are
nonreplaceable PTC devices. In the nearish left is a
large square chip, the MSI. For 270-1733-12, it may be
either 100-2905-02 (L1A6396) or 100-2905-03 (L1B7596).
The SBus and MBus connectors are in two rows across the
middle of the board. The leftmost pair are the MBus
connectors, with slot 0 closer and slot 1 farther away.
SBus slots 0 and 1 are the middle pair, slot 0 closer,
and slots 2 and 3 are the rightmost pair, slot 2 closer.
There are two connectors, J1201 and J1203, to the right
of the SIMM slots, whose purpose is not known.

[wepwawet]

If it was a SS10 then the CPU must have been on a MBus-card and not on the board.

[FDIV]

I do not have the board but it was different from this. The entire board slid out of the chassis without any wires to unplug. The left rear of the board (if you are behind the rear connectors looking down) had the graphics chipset verticaly displaced and parallel with the mainboard. These chips were on the right hand side of the board. Above them vertically displaced and parallel to the ma inboard. were the cache chips. I do not believe it is possible that I could have missed finding the processor on the board but I do think it is possible that the processor could have been located in one of the side bays of the very unusual tower server case this machine had. All of these bays were empty when I found the case. The bays were not laid out in a recognizable pattern. The whole case was very strange in this way. It was not apparent which were for hard drives, expansions, or possibly even processors. The motherboard, oddly enough was in the center of the case in its own large rectangular bay.

[ItsMeOnly]

this is a bus controller, not a CPU

and yes, LSI did produce SPARCs, they were used in SS1, IPC and IPX, presumably SS2 too.

[wepwawet]

The CPUs in my IPX and SS2 are Weitek and Fujitsu. LSI made the cache.

When your board had six horizontal slots in two rows with different height and the right two were different from the middle and left one these were the MBUS slots that contained the CPU cards. The Mainboatd didn't contain the CPU itself as it didn't have a Graphics chipset. This was attached by a SBUS card.
Your chip appears to be the on the SS10 picture above, my SS10s have the L1B variant also mentioned above.