Unreleased Amiga chipset better than anything today?

[Pyromania]

Something cool that never came out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

The claim is it’s better than anything on the market today.

[ Show youtube player ]

[hammer]

Today's market?

NVIDIA RTX Turing/Ampere/Ada Lovelace, AMD NAVI 2x/3x and Intel Arc 7xx have BVH-based real-time raytracing.

Amiga Hombre's OpenGL support is primitive i.e. does it run Crysis?

During the mid-1990s, gaming PCs and N64 consoles moved towards OpenGL-based 3D.

Nintendo 64 has SGI engineers who broke off and form the "Art X" company which is later purchased by ATI (AMD).

[Pyromania]

Yea, I was surprised by the todays comment as well.

[TCD]

I'm struggling a bit how to word this, but maybe David isn't the most brilliant mind when it comes to technological progress.

[Pyromania]

I feel for him, getting old is never fun and he did get really sick last year.

[hammer]

NVIDIA was cofounded by the following persons.
1. Jensen Huang, a microprocessor designer at AMD.

2. Chris Malachowsky, worked for Hewlett-Packard (HP ) and Sun Microsystems.

3. Curtis Priem, from 1986 to 1993, he was a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he developed the GX graphics chip.

From 1990, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/46768

A novel approach to acceleration is described whereby high-level graphics on entry-level workstations has become practical. In the GX, the host CPU functions as the intelligent controller and two large ASICs (application-specific ICs) supply hardwired graphics functions. An arbitrary quadrilateral is the GX's only geometric primitive. However, it can readily approximate circle and arc primitives with short line segments. In addition, the GX supports flat shading of images only when every pixel on a polygon is the same color or intensity. However, by breaking the object into many smaller objects (tessellation), each with its own color, users can obtain a visually acceptable approximation to Gouraud-shading techniques. A description is given of the frame buffer chip and its graphic attributes and of the transformation engine and cursor chip. The chips do not have the complex instructions found in CISC (complex-instruction-set-computer) processors; rather, they perform the equivalent of very complicated software subroutines. The high speed and scalable performance of the GX and its software interface are discussed.


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The quadrilateral polygon 3D accelerator method later appeared in Sega's Model 1 (developed from 1990 to 1991) and Saturn (1994), and NVIDIA NV1 (1995).

Sega's Model 2 used Lockheed Martin's Real3D texture technology which was later purchased by Intel in 1999. Sega Model 2 appeared in 1994. Intel ARC says hello.

Intel's 1991 i860 RISC-VLIW includes 64-bit SIMD and was used as a workstation 64-bit graphics accelerator. i860 can combine 32 32-bit registers into 8 128-bit floating-point registers. The graphics supports SIMD-like instructions in addition to basic 64-bit integer math. For instance, its 64-bit integer datapath can represent multiple pixels together as either 8-bit pixels, 16-bit pixels, or 32-bit pixels. Experience with the i860 influenced the MMX functionality later added to Intel's 1997 Pentium processors. i860's 8 128-bit floating-point registers also influenced 8 128-bit SSE for the Pentium III.

VLIW CPU design reappeared as Intel's Itanium. Windows NT was developed on i860XR-based workstations before it was ported to MIPS, i386, and other CPUs.

SGI's Reality Engine used i860 as a geometry engine. OpenGL which comes with IRIX 5.3 supports Entry, XS, XS24, XZ, XL, Elan, Extreme, VTX, Reality Engine, Reality Engine 2, G (on 4D20, 25, 30, and 35s only) TG (as G), VGX, and VGXT graphics. OpenGL has the triangle polygon system which later influenced MS's Direct3D and Nintendo 64.

AMD's Am29K RISC CPUs were used as graphics and FP accelerators.

Workstation 3D graphics are being cost-reduced by major players.

AMD/ATI, NVIDIA, and Intel can trace their 3D IP back to early 1990s 3D graphics workstations.

[giantclam]

Don't forget 3DFX / Glide =)

[grond]

What a sad clown. He clearly didn't understand anything and just remembers the buzzwords of the time.

How was a software-emulation of a chipset doing something that Pleasance could see but hardware couldn't do back then?

All this Hombre stuff sounds like a Commodore Wunderwaffe to me. Yes, with more foresight perhaps Commodore could have made the Playstation but they would have had to start such a project much earlier. We got the technology anyway, just as much Amiga-incompatible as Hombre would have been. So why should we care?

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by grond

All this Hombre stuff sounds like a Commodore Wunderwaffe to me. Yes, with more foresight perhaps Commodore could have made the Playstation but they would have had to start such a project much earlier. We got the technology anyway, just as much Amiga-incompatible as Hombre would have been. So why should we care?

Because almost all accelerators (Yes, including the Vampire) and GPUs skip the blitter entirely? One of the Amiga's most important components gets ignored and almost everything is done with the extra hardware instead. It could've been improved even more with the Hombre chipset, but alas...

[grond]

What a blitter does from today's perspective is render a flat textured object without any lightsourcing. A blitter simply isn't relevant today. And no chunky2planar (!), 5.1 sound (woah!) and unimaginable software-emulated stuff of the 90s created by a single person and only witnessed by David Pleasance either.

[Bren McGuire]

have we not had enough of David Pleasance? the man is delusional. this is a load of poppycock he doesnt even understand the slightest thing about Amiga, he never owned one!!! can we stop giving this man a platform!

[Photon]

I'm one of those who is mad about the original chipsets, and a graphics cards is a perfectly good and meaningful expansion which doesn't change the platform unless you run OS code on it. If there isn't some standard API supported by the OS though, you go through the same changes as PC did, becoming a jumble of parts rather than a platform.

I draw the line at Motorola-designed CPUs, because there is always emulation involved if you go beyond that, meaning that you change the platform.

The battle is on even today, with Apple computers refusing to be a platform and swapping out the CPU type and removing support for standard graphics APIs.

The Hombre platform sounds like something that would replace the native chipset, and if so it would have changed the Amiga platform to another.

Even with tons of support, engines, shaders and hand-holding everywhere, RTX is still terribly slow. It's not used to ray-trace full frames, as polygon acceleration or a 3D rendering program would. Even full-scene antialiasing polygons can be too much for costly gaming PCs.

And of course GPUs still use Blitters, but mostly for clearing and copying; they're not good enough for much else. Ask a modern GPU to draw some lines, or fill individual polygons and not others, and you have some work ahead of you, because... PCs are just for gaming?

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Photon

The Hombre platform sounds like something that would replace the native chipset, and if so it would have changed the Amiga platform to another.

Not necessarily - you could provide HW for legacy software and combine graphic simply as layer in modern chipset (and this can be fully retargetable i.e. HW agnostic).

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

Something cool that never came out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

The claim is it’s better than anything on the market today.

[ Show youtube player ]

LOL

It was claimed it was at least as comparable to a Playstation.

Had it been released, its possible that Playstation level titles could have been released for it, but to suggest that it was so powerful back in the 90's that it would be comparable today is just talk from someone that literally has no clue what they are talking about.

For that statement to be true, Hombre would be delivering PS5 levels of power during the PS1 era, and that demonstrably isn't true.

It does sound like Hombre would have been a significant step up from Amiga AGA by quite some degree, but had it been released and had Commodore not gone under, for sure they would not have been able to sit on Hombre and pretend that was them sorted for the future, once Hombre was released, they would have been starting research into its successor.

Powerful for the 90's, but that was nearly 30 years ago, and technology has moved on quite a bit from Hombre.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Bren McGuire

have we not had enough of David Pleasance? the man is delusional. this is a load of poppycock he doesnt even understand the slightest thing about Amiga, he never owned one!!! can we stop giving this man a platform!

I don't think that repeatedly calling his sanity into question qualifies as giving someone a platform. Quite the opposite really, it's yanked out from under him.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

LOL

It was claimed it was at least as comparable to a Playstation.

Had it been released, its possible that Playstation level titles could have been released for it, but to suggest that it was so powerful back in the 90's that it would be comparable today is just talk from someone that literally has no clue what they are talking about.

For that statement to be true, Hombre would be delivering PS5 levels of power during the PS1 era, and that demonstrably isn't true.

Just pointing this out, but the more expensive PCs from the late 90s already had graphics comparable to the PS2, GameCube and original Xbox. Developers just didn't tap into their power because of limitations on multi-platform games, wide range of hardware and all that

[Thorham]

What an absurd statement to make. He's basically saying that Hombre would've been more powerful than tens of millions of dollars worth of super computer equipment of the time

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Thorham

What an absurd statement to make. He's basically saying that Hombre would've been more powerful than tens of millions of dollars worth of super computer equipment of the time

Not just back then, but even today! Move over, RTX 4090 and Intel Core i9 13900KS

[grelbfarlk]

I'm more confused he thinks Hombre means motherlover.

[Pyromania]

Never forget the Batman! He moved a ton of Amigas to the masses for us! We all would not be here if it wasn't for the Batman. Congrats on that campaign!

https://filmstories.co.uk/features/h...iga-computers/