Amiga Hombre chipset
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History
In 1993, Commodore International cancelled the development of the AAA chipset and began to design a new 64 bit multimedia system with 3D graphics chipset including fully RISC architecture that would once again bring the Amiga back into the limelight. It was to be known as 'Hombre' multimedia system and would be developed in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard over an estimated 18 month period.
Design
Hombre (pronounced ómbre which means man in Spanish) was based around two chips: a System Controller-chip and a Display Controller chip
The System Controller-chip was designed by Dr. Ed Hepler, well known as the designer of the AAA Andrea chip. The chip is similar in principle to the Chip Bus Controller found in Agnus, Alice, and Andrea of the classic Amiga Chipset. The chip featured:
- a PA-RISC processor (PA-7150) at 125 MHz clock cycle.
- an advanced DMA engine and blitter with 3D texture mapping plus gouraud shading
- a 16-bit resolution sound processor with eight voices
The Display Controller Chip was designed by Tim McDonald, also known as the designer of the AAA Monica chip. It is similar in principe to the Denise, Lisa, and Monica chips found on "Classic Amigas". In addition, the chipset also supported future official or third party upgrades through extension for an external PA-RISC processor.
These chips and some other circuitry would be part of a PCI card (through a ReTargetable graphics system). Hombre would form the basis to the Amiga CD32 type game console that would launch in 1995 and would be competing with Sony's Playstation and Sega Saturn.
There were plans to port the AmigaOS Exec kernel to low-end systems, but this was not possible due to financial troubles facing Commodore at that time. Therefore, a licenced OpenGL library was to be used for the low-end entertainment system.
The original plan for the Amiga CD32 was to have Windows NT compatibility, with native AmigaOS recompiled for the new big-endian CPU to run 68k AmigaOS legacy software through emulation. Commodore therefore chose the PA-RISC 7150 CPU over MIPS R3000 RISC CPU and first generations embedded PowerPCs, mainly because these low cost CPUs were unqualified to run Windows NT. This wasn't the case for the 64-bit MIPS R4200, but this was rejected for its relative high price at the time.
Capabilities
Hombre was designed with a clean break from traditional Amiga chipset architecture with no planar graphics modes. Hombre has an indirect 8-bit (256 colors) chunky mode which could be chosen from 24-bit CLUT. Only 32 bit (24-bit with 8-bit alpha channel) and 16-bit chunky graphic modes would be supported with 1280 x 1024 resolution in 16.8 million colors. Additionally, the chipset would display 4 playfields at 16 bit graphics mode each. Standard TV compatibility and HDTV was also included in Hombre.
The chipset would be capable of using 64-bit DRAM, a high resolution PCI graphics card, minimal peripherals ASICs and DRAM.
For an entertainment system Hombre could have a cheap 32-bit DRAM for a lower cost CD-ROM game system (possibly CD64), it could also be used for Set-Top-Box embedded systems.
According to Dr. Ed Hepler Hombre was to be fabricated in 0.6 µm 3-level metal CMOS with the help of HP (which fabricated AGA Lisa chip and collaborated in AAA chipset designing).
However Commodore were planning to adopt Acutiator advanced architecture designed by Dave Haynie for Hombre before it went out of business and bankrupt.