Hombre is a

RISC In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set comput ...

chipset for the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

, designed by

Commodore Commodore may refer to: Ranks * Commodore (rank), a naval rank ** Commodore (Royal Navy), in the United Kingdom ** Commodore (United States) ** Commodore (Canada) ** Commodore (Finland) ** Commodore (Germany) or ''Kommodore'' * Air commodore, a ...

, which was intended as the basis of a range of Amiga personal computers and multimedia products, including a successor to the

Amiga 1200 The Amiga 1200, or A1200 (code-named " Channel Z"), is a personal computer in the Amiga computer family released by Commodore International, aimed at the home computer market. It was launched on October 21, 1992, at a base price of £399 in the ...

, a next generation game machine called CD64 and a 3D accelerator PCI card. Hombre was canceled along with the bankruptcy of

Commodore International Commodore International (other names include Commodore International Limited) was an American home computer and electronics manufacturer founded by Jack Tramiel. Commodore International (CI), along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Mach ...

History

In 1993, Commodore International ceased the development of the

AAA chipset The AAA chipset (Advanced Amiga Architecture) was intended to be the next-generation Amiga multimedia system designed by Commodore International. Initially begun as a secret project, the first design discussions were started in 1988, and after m ...

when they concluded conventional

PC clone IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones. ...

s would have similar performance shortly after the AAA machines would be released. In the place of AAA, Commodore began to design a new

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit Integer (computer science), integers, memory addresses, or other Data (computing), data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing unit, CPUs and arithmetic logic unit, ALUs are those ...

3D graphics

chipset In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components An electronic component is any basic discrete device or physical entity in an electronic system used to affect electrons or their associated fields. Electronic components are ...

based on

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

PA-RISC PA-RISC is an instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hewlett-Packard. As the name implies, it is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, where the PA stands for Precision Architecture. The design is also referred to as ...

architecture to serve as the new basis of the

personal computer series. It was codenamed Hombre (pronounced "ómbre" which means ''man'' in

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...

) and was developed in conjunction with

over an estimated eighteen-month period.

Backward compatibility

Hombre does not support any planar mode, nor any emulation for the legacy Amiga chipset or

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent p ...

680x0 CPU registers, so it was completely incompatible with former Amiga models. According to Hombre designer Dr. Ed Hepler, Commodore intended to produce an AGA Amiga upon a single chip to solve the backward compatibility issues. This single chip would include Motorola MC680x0 core, plus the AGA chipset. The chip could be integrated in Hombre based computers for backward compatibility with AGA software.

Design

Hombre is based around two chips: Nathaniel, a System Controller chip, and Natalie, 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

Amiga chipsets Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

. Nathaniel features the following: * An inhouse designed 100+ MHz

integer An integer is the number zero (), a positive natural number (, , , etc.) or a negative integer with a minus sign (−1, −2, −3, etc.). The negative numbers are the additive inverses of the corresponding positive numbers. In the language ...

microprocessor with

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it should ...

and additional graphics processing related instructions * An advanced DMA engine and

blitter A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to anot ...

with

fixed-point arithmetic In computing, fixed-point is a method of representing fractional (non-integer) numbers by storing a fixed number of digits of their fractional part. Dollar amounts, for example, are often stored with exactly two fractional digits, representi ...

texture mapping Texture mapping is a method for mapping a texture on a computer-generated graphic. Texture here can be high frequency detail, surface texture, or color. History The original technique was pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1974. Texture mapping ...

and

gouraud shading Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes. In practice, Gouraud shading is most often used to achieve continuous l ...

using

trapezoid A quadrilateral with at least one pair of parallel sides is called a trapezoid () in American and Canadian English. In British and other forms of English, it is called a trapezium (). A trapezoid is necessarily a Convex polygon, convex quadri ...

s as primitives * 64-bit risc-like

Copper Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkis ...

co-processor * 16-bit resolution sound processor with twelve voices Additional logic has been included to permit some floating point operations to be performed in hardware, a floating point register file is included. The inclusion of a full

double precision Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. Flo ...

floating point unit Floating may refer to: * a type of dental work performed on horse teeth * use of an isolation tank * the guitar-playing technique where chords are sustained rather than scratched * ''Floating'' (play), by Hugh Hughes * Floating (psychological phe ...

was also under consideration. The Display Controller Chip was designed by Tim McDonald, also known as the designer of the AAA Monica chip. It is similar in principle to the Denise, Lisa, and Monica chips found on original Amigas. In addition, the chipset also supported future official or third-party upgrades through extension for an external

processor. Natalie features the following: * VGA monitor control * Built in

genlock Genlock (generator locking) is a common technique where the video output of one source (or a specific reference signal from a signal generator) is used to synchronize other picture sources together. The aim in video applications is to ensure the ...

and framegrabber * Logic for 2 analog game port joysticks These chips and some other circuitry would be part of a

PCI PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Pro ...

card, through the ReTargetable Graphics system. Additional IO for peripherals such as floppy drive, keyboard and mice would have been provided with a separate dedicated peripheral ASIC. There were plans to port the

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...

Exec kernel to low-end systems, but this was not possible due to financial troubles facing Commodore at that time. Therefore, a licensed

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

library was to be used for the low-end entertainment system. The original plan for the Hombre-based computer system was to have

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems sc ...

compatibility, with native

recompiled for the new

big-endian In computing, endianness, also known as byte sex, is the order or sequence of bytes of a word of digital data in computer memory. Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE). A big-endian system stores the most sig ...

CPU to run legacy 68k Amiga software through

emulation Emulation may refer to: *Emulation (computing), imitation of behavior of a computer or other electronic system with the help of another type of system :*Video game console emulator, software which emulates video game consoles *Gaussian process em ...

. Commodore chose the PA-RISC instruction set over the

MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

and first generation embedded

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

microprocessors, mainly because these low-cost microprocessors were unqualified to run

. This wasn't the case for the

MIPS

R4200 The R4200 is a microprocessor designed by MIPS Technologies, Inc. (MTI) that implemented the MIPS III instruction set architecture (ISA). It was also known as the VRX during development. The microprocessor was licensed to NEC, and the company fa ...

, but it was rejected for its high price at the time.

Features

Hombre was designed as a clean break from traditional Amiga chipset architecture with no

planar Planar is an adjective meaning "relating to a plane (geometry)". Planar may also refer to: Science and technology * Planar (computer graphics), computer graphics pixel information from several bitplanes * Planar (transmission line technologies), ...

graphics mode support. Hombre also doesn't feature the original eight Amiga sprites, early iterations of Hombre featured a new, incompatible sprite engine but Commodore decided to drop sprites because sprites had become less attractive to developers compared with fast blitters. Despite lack of compatibility, Hombre introduced modern technologies including these: * Fill rate of 30 million 3D rendered pixels per second (similar to Sony's

PlayStation is a video gaming brand that consists of five home video game consoles, two handhelds, a media center, and a smartphone, as well as an online service and multiple magazines. The brand is produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment, a divisi ...

performance) * Special Function Unit (SFU)

extension for rasterizing multiple pixels with a single 64-bit operation * 16-bit chunky graphic modes (to reduce costs, Commodore abandoned 256 color mode with Color LUT registers) * 32-bit chunky with 8-bit

alpha channel In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pas ...

* 1280 × 1024 pixel progressive resolution with a 24-bit color palette * One sprite with a 24-bit color palette, used for the mouse pointer * Four scalable playfields, each with their own graphics mode (e.g. 16bpp, HAM-8) * 512 25-bit color look up tables (24-bit color + 1 bit for genlock) * 3D

engine *

Gouraud shading Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes. In practice, Gouraud shading is most often used to achieve continuous l ...

Z-buffering A depth buffer, also known as a z-buffer, is a type of data buffer used in computer graphics to represent depth information of objects in 3D space from a particular perspective. Depth buffers are an aid to rendering a scene to ensure that the ...

YUV YUV is a color model typically used as part of a color image pipeline. It encodes a color image or video taking human perception into account, allowing reduced bandwidth for chrominance components, compared to a "direct" RGB-representation. H ...

compatibility with

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

support * Standard TV and

HDTV High-definition television (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the g ...

compatibility * 64-bit internal data bus and registers The chipset could be sold either as a high end

graphics card with minimal peripherals

ASIC An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficien ...

s and 64-bit

DRAM Dynamic random-access memory (dynamic RAM or DRAM) is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell, usually consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor, both typically based on metal-oxid ...

, or as a lower cost

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...

based game system (CD64) using cheap

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

. It could also be used for

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

embedded systems. According to Dr. Ed Hepler, Hombre was to be fabricated in 3-level metal

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...

with the help of

. HP had fabricated the

AGA Aga or AGA may refer to: Business * Architectural Glass and Aluminum (AGA), a glazing contractor, established in 1970 * AGA (automobile), ''Autogen Gasaccumulator AG'', 1920s German car company *AGA AB, ''Aktiebolaget Svenska Gasaccumulator'', a ...

Lisa chip and collaborated in the design of the AAA chipset. Commodore was planning to adopt the Acutiator architecture designed by

Dave Haynie Dave Haynie is an American electrical engineer and was chief engineer at Commodore International. He is vocal in the Amiga community. See also * Metabox (on German Wikipedia) * PIOS The International Open Series (often referred to as Pontin ...

for Hombre before it filed

bankruptcy Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor ...

and went out of business.

References

External links

Amiga history

1993-1994 Hombre hardware design documents

1998 Dr. Edward L. Hepler interview about Hombre

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20100414222302/http://www.thule.no/haynie/ The Dave Haynie Archive with much detailed info and specs*
Chris Ludwig Interview
*
Article about Hombre

{{Amiga hardware Amiga chipsets Graphics processing units Sound chips