Hombre is a

RISC In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a comp ...

chipset for the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

, designed by

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

, 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 Corporation was a home computer and electronics manufacturer with its head office in The Bahamas and its executive office in the United States founded in 1976 by Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould. It was the successor compan ...

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 An IBM PC compatible is any personal computer that is hardware- and software-compatible with the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) and its subsequent models. Like the original IBM PC, an IBM PC–compatible computer uses an x86-based central pro ...

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 integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

3D graphics

chipset In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components on one or more integrated circuits that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. The chipset is usually found on the motherboard of computers. Chips ...

based on

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

PA-RISC Precision Architecture reduced instruction set computer, RISC (PA-RISC) or Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture (HP/PA or simply HPPA), is a computer, general purpose computer instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hewlett-Packard f ...

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 countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

) 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 telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

680x0

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

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 produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

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

integer An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (1, 2, 3, ...), or the negation of a positive natural number (−1, −2, −3, ...). The negations or additive inverses of the positive natural numbers are referred to as negative in ...

microprocessor with

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel computer, parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneousl ...

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 a ...

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, represen ...

texture mapping Texture mapping is a term used in computer graphics to describe how 2D images are projected onto 3D models. The most common variant is the UV unwrap, which can be described as an inverse paper cutout, where the surfaces of a 3D model are cut ap ...

and

gouraud shading Gouraud shading ( ), named after Henri Gouraud (computer scientist), Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by Polygon mesh, polygon meshes. In practice, Gouraud ...

using

trapezoid In geometry, a trapezoid () in North American English, or trapezium () in British English, is a quadrilateral that has at least one pair of parallel sides. The parallel sides are called the ''bases'' of the trapezoid. The other two sides are ...

s as primitives * 64-bit RISC-like

Copper Copper is a chemical element; it has symbol Cu (from Latin ) 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 pinkish-orang ...

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

double precision Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point arithmetic, floating-point computer number format, number format, usually occupying 64 Bit, bits in computer memory; it represents a wide range of numeri ...

floating point unit A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multipli ...

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 * Prov ...

card, through the

ReTargetable Graphics Retargetable graphics (abbreviated as RTG) is a device driver API mainly used by third-party graphics hardware to interface with AmigaOS via a set of libraries. The software libraries may include software tools to adjust resolution, screen colors, ...

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 versions ...

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 Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

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 software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...

compatibility, with native

recompiled for the new

big-endian '' Jonathan_Swift.html" ;"title="Gulliver's Travels'' by Jonathan Swift">Gulliver's Travels'' by Jonathan Swift, the novel from which the term was coined In computing, endianness is the order in which bytes within a word (data type), word of d ...

CPU to run legacy

68k The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and w ...

Amiga software through emulation. 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, 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 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 owned and produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), a division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. Its flagship products consists of a series of home video game consoles produced under the brand; it also consists ...

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 pass ...

* 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 (computer scientist), Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by Polygon mesh, polygon meshes. In practice, Gouraud ...

Z-buffering A z-buffer, also known as a depth buffer, is a type of data buffer used in computer graphics to store the depth information of fragments. The values stored represent the distance to the camera, with 0 being the closest. The encoding scheme may ...

* YUV compatibility with

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

support * Standard TV and

HDTV High-definition television (HDTV) describes a television or video system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since at least 1933; in more recent times, it ref ...

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 Dram, DRAM, or drams may refer to: Technology and engineering * Dram (unit), a unit of mass and volume, and an informal name for a small amount of liquor, especially whisky or whiskey * Dynamic random-access memory, a type of electronic semicondu ...

, 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 computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

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 a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...

. It could also be used for

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also known as a cable converter box, cable box, receiver, or simply box, and historically television decoder or a converter, is an information appliance device that generally contains a Tuner (radio)#Television, TV tuner inpu ...

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 MOSFET, metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) semiconductor device fabrication, fabrication process that uses complementary an ...

with the help of

. HP had fabricated the AGA 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 Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's ...

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 deb ...

and went out of business.

References

External links