Unreleased Amiga chipset better than anything today?

[Pyromania]

For all of us after a few pints at the pub with our Hombres the tales get taller, the memory’s get fuzzy and more exaggerated the girls get prettier and the boobas get bigger and bigger.

[grelbfarlk]

And that's when Dave Haynie said in 1993, here's let me start up Crysis on this Hombre chip. It was mounted in a Walker case, it was like nothing I've seen before. He went to save his game and it gave a write error. So he ejected the floppy and moved the slider over. That's when he said you know how much this floppy contains? And I said that must be an HD floppy, he said no. It's a RISC floppy, it has nearly 600 floppies on this, because of the Hombre chipsteps. Which was astounding. And I was amazed that it didn't spin any faster than usual. That's how advanced that Hombre was.

[Pyromania]

Hombres got nothing on the mythical Latina Amiga chipset.

[grelbfarlk]

It wasn't mythical. I seen it! I tell you! Petro and I were sitting in a cantina in Tijuana. I was asking about the IO chip that supported the PCI bus. He was ordering a tray of margs for some ladies at the bar and said "Vhen dey come over, say I am I a leader of a cartel." I said sure, and I asked what kind of library support did the Walker PCI bus have? He said it has full DMA access and did I see this one in the leopard print? At that point someone came over and dropped an envelope in his lap. He said we are going to see shades of colors that are way above 255 and way below 0 and be prepared that there are guns beyond RGB, and I should expect them.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

PlayStation had Net Yaroze, so the wall wasn't that high.

NetYaroze was a promotion by Sony Computer Entertainment to computer programming hobbyists which launched in June 1996 in Japan and in 1997 in other countries.

Too late.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Hardly a market worth pursuing.

But a PC would be the more obvious choice.

Ah yes, that's why everybody was buying PA-RISC machines instead of PCs.

And? PA-RISC wasn't IBM compatible, so it was a non-starter regardless of what it could do.

Raspberry Pi is not IBM-compatible and it's low cost established ~500,000 monthly sales.

Raspberry Pi's low price has reduced consumers' financial risk for the ARM-based Pi platform.

----
The PC market has Advanced Computer Environment (ACE) that focused on MIPS R4000 and Alpha CPU families. Intel's rapid X86 CPU R&D and release of the P6 Pentium Pro made Advanced Computer Environment (ACE) useless.

Advanced Computer Environment consortium was announced on the 9th of April 1991 by Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).

Ine reported motivation for Compaq's involvement in ACE was to "light a fire under Intel" and get the company to produce a roadmap that was competitive enough for Compaq's customers. Intel's response was to accelerate the delivery of the Pentium and to pursue parallel development of three generations of future products (P5, P6, and P7), thus providing a roadmap that could dissuade its customers from adopting RISC architectures.

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Precision RISC Organization, an industry group led by HP, was founded in 1992, to promote the PA-RISC architecture. Members included Convex, Hitachi, Hughes Aircraft, Mitsubishi, NEC, OKI, Prime, Stratus, Yokogawa, Red Brick Software, and Allegro Consultants, Inc.

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The AIM alliance, also known as the PowerPC alliance, was formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple, IBM, and Motorola.

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The ARM CPU is backed by ARM-based corporate titans like Qualcomm, Apple, Broadcom, and Samsung. Raspberry Pi leverages Broadcom's SoC business.

As a backup plan, AMD has created Zen-based ARMv8 as the K12 and continues work with Samsung's ARM-based SoCs with RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 IGP.

RISC threat is real.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Today the PS5 will do real-time ray tracing, we have achieved a holy grail moment with AMDs sterling patented hack that enables this to be affordable. As someone who bought a copy of Turbo Silver for my Amiga 2000 many decades ago and waiting hours for my ray traced scenes to appear it really is amazing how far even mediocre priced consoles can do, it's no longer the preserve of people with many many thousands invested in top end of what gaming PC at any price is capable of.

Maybe David is fixating on one thing the chipset would do that still isn't done today, and in fairness he does say his memory is terrible and he is not a technical person.

PS5 digital edition has a $399 asking price.

RX 6750XT 12 GB has reached the $355 range while RX 7900 XT 20 GB has reached the $699 price range. AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT 20 GB has gotten another price cut, now selling for as low as $664 at Newegg.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by hammer

RISC threat is real.

All the best bits of RISC have been in every CPU for years, even the x86 ones. Every modern CPU separates the external instructions from the internal microcode and it turned out once you did that you didn't really need RISC instructions externally to benefit, in fact you could get the benefits of CISC type instructions with RISC like internals.

The idea there is any appreciable difference in this day and age is a nonsense.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

NetYaroze was a promotion by Sony Computer Entertainment to computer programming hobbyists which launched in June 1996 in Japan and in 1997 in other countries.

Too late.


Raspberry Pi is not IBM-compatible and it's low cost established ~500,000 monthly sales.

If Net Yaroze was too late, Raspberry Pi was even worse - two decades too late.

Not that I care. I have no interest in the Pi apart from as a hardware expansion device for the Amiga, which we can finally do now that we know enough about its hardware to program it 'bare metal'. Actually even that doesn't interest me much. I decided not to get a PiStorm because it would just be waste of money and distract me from the stuff I want to do on the Amiga.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

It was only really expensive in 1993, by early 1994 other models came out at $399 and then $299 later on when sales would have pushed through, of course the PSX hype train stopped that, but don’t forget this is the alternate reality here where people didn’t hold out for this exciting new fangled Sony thing.

The 3DO was the single biggest leap in games consoles, i’m not sure how anyone can say it wasn’t that great, in what regards does the hardware disappoint you? (ignoring the PSX and Saturn, this is 1993 btw).

Commodore had plans for the CD64 (Hombre based) for late 1995, yet they also had plans for an upgraded CD32 in late 1994 with an 030/28 and 32k nvram, but still had the same slow 2mb chip ram.

3DO was cross-gen console between 2D arcade quality ports (CP System 1/2 and early 3D. [ Show youtube player ]
3DO's 12.5 Mhz ARM60 CPU wasn't strong while the dual pixel engine (CEL engine) was okay. 3DO's Doom presentation wasn't good due to a weak CPU which impacted the software renderer.

3DO and Saturn were using distorted sprites/CELs.
The 3DO is also using quadrilaterals and its CEL engine is also capable of distorting sprites (scaling, transparency) just like the Sega Saturn.
A CEL is basically some kind of sprite that can be distorted/modified.

PS1 focused on extensive polygon 3D and exclusive titles.

Amiga Hombre has a 100 Mhz PA-RISC 71xx CPU variant with 64-bit Max SIMD and OpenGL 3D acceleration target.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

If Net Yaroze was too late, Raspberry Pi was even worse - two decades too late.

The difference, Raspberry Pi is cheap and Raspberry Foundation was able to curve the ARM-based Pi platform with 500,000 monthly sales.

Net Yaroze was priced at around $750 US. The user has to provide a personal computer (an IBM PC compatible or Macintosh; NEC PC-9801 was also supported in Japan) to write the computer code, compile it, and send the program to the PlayStation.

$750 in 1997 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $1,421.15 today. I rather purchase GeForce RTX 4080 or RX 7900 XTX or Ryzen 9 7900X/X670E mobo/32 GB DDR5-6000.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Not that I care. I have no interest in the Pi apart from as a hardware expansion device for the Amiga, which we can finally do now that we know enough about its hardware to program it 'bare metal'. Actually even that doesn't interest me much. I decided not to get a PiStorm because it would just be waste of money and distract me from the stuff I want to do on the Amiga.

You omitted Net Yaroze's $750 asking price and it's NOT self-hosting! Net Yaroze is not a MIPS-based workstation.

A1200 is self-hosting.

Raspberry Pi 4B is self-hosted with a Linux desktop and development toolchain. I was able to download the latest Emu68 FPGA gateway firmware (7.1 MB/s Chip RAM improvements) and update Emu68's firmware which is located on the Fat32 partition within the AmigaOS host. My A1200's Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB can boot and run Linux ARM Pi desktop with a USB keyboard, USB mouse, and built-in WiFi. It can also boot and run Windows 10 ARM edition. Both A1200 (via PCMCIA WiFi) and Raspberry Pi 4B has WiFi internet.

My A1200 (with PiStorm32 Lite-Emu68) covers both my Amiga 68K and Mac 68K retro in a small keyboard device and rejoins the modern internet-capable device via Linux ARM / Windows 10 ARM desktop.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

All the best bits of RISC have been in every CPU for years, even the x86 ones. Every modern CPU separates the external instructions from the internal microcode and it turned out once you did that you didn't really need RISC instructions externally to benefit, in fact you could get the benefits of CISC type instructions with RISC like internals.

The idea there is any appreciable difference in this day and age is a nonsense.

You missed my comment about Intel Pentium Pro i.e. "Intel's rapid X86 CPU R&D and release of the P6 Pentium Pro made Advanced Computer Environment (ACE) useless."

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Photon

Hombre seems like Sega Saturn in 1993. David can be faulted for not remembering tech from 30 years ago. The video is a mash-up intended to attack his statements from various years.

Sega Saturn can't be converted into a Windows NT OpenGL workstation.

Amiga Hombre targeted Windows NT and OpenGL compliance.

Sega Saturn's 3D capability is based on a distorted sprite engine and it's NOT OpenGL hardware accelerated capable.

Sega Saturn is trash like NVIDIA's NV1 and Sun's GX 3D. SGI is the 1990s 3D king. I welcome a low-cost SGI OpenGL-like workstation.

[Bren McGuire]

hey man wake up it's 2023 you've been in a coma for 30 years! Amiga Hombre does not exist and technology moved on.

Originally Posted by hammer

Amiga Hombre has a 100 Mhz PA-RISC 71xx CPU variant with 64-bit Max SIMD and OpenGL 3D acceleration target.

[haps]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

It wasn't mythical. I seen it! I tell you! Petro and I were sitting in a cantina in Tijuana. I was asking about the IO chip that supported the PCI bus. He was ordering a tray of margs for some ladies at the bar and said "Vhen dey come over, say I am I a leader of a cartel." I said sure, and I asked what kind of library support did the Walker PCI bus have? He said it has full DMA access and did I see this one in the leopard print? At that point someone came over and dropped an envelope in his lap. He said we are going to see shades of colors that are way above 255 and way below 0 and be prepared that there are guns beyond RGB, and I should expect them.

I was there hombre. I remember all the bendecos in the corner snivelling like coyotes. The chinelos had their dresses swirling as they danced. Then a mariachi band came in and everything went to hell. Machete showed up and started machetting people with abandon. I swallowed my beer and a couple of peyote buttons and ran for the hills.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bren McGuire

hey man wake up it's 2023 you've been in a coma for 30 years! Amiga Hombre does not exist and technology moved on.

My "Amiga Hombre has a 100 Mhz PA-RISC 71xx CPU variant with 64-bit Max SIMD and OpenGL 3D acceleration target" statement is for the 1995-1996 context.

https://i.ibb.co/4fwjLyW/PXL-20230427-081840378.jpg
My Ryzen 9 7950X + 64 GB DDR5-6000 + ASUS ROG X670E Hero + ASUS TUF RTX 4090 OC 24 GB. My gaming PC is in 2023 era. It has a very fast Blender 3.4 raytracing performance.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Sorry, but that is wrong. Resolution is the number of pixels or lines across and down the screen. 31kHz is a scan rate.

While that's true, when you change the number of horizontal pixels to something other than a multiple of 320, the scan rate will probably change, meaning that in practice this is still likely to be correct. Perhaps an AGA monitor experiment with MonspecsMui is in order.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

An OS feature they couldn't add with the original VGA card, and with limited success on (some) later cards.

Not without slow CPU based code, no.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Scaling is a different thing. Now you are talking about converting different resolutions to be all the same, with results that may not be very satisfactory.

Depends on how the scaling is done and the resolution of the target display.

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

It was a useful feature in 1985, the hardware wasn't beefy enough to run the desktop with high colour depth but you wanted to be able to multitask with things like Deluxe Paint and still paint in the full HAM colour range. And we could all live with the quirks that "screens" were kind of clumsy versions of windows that were less flexible in terms of positioning.

Full screen switching is MUCH better than windows for applications where it makes sense. This ability is anything but clumsy and would be nice to have under Windows as an addition to just ALT-TAB.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Sorry, but that is wrong. Resolution is the number of pixels or lines across and down the screen. 31kHz is a scan rate. A CRT has no concept of horizontal resolution, it only knows about brightness and line width. LCD panels have scalers that try to lock onto the pixels and then stretch them if necessary, often resulting in a poor display if the signal resolution doesn't match the LCD panel's native resolution.

You are a very funny man. Here is a bit of background on all this nonsense...


You can mix modes if the pixel clocks are identical between the modes, which is the rate by which the data is pushed to the monitor (analog or digital). Amiga can mix modes because "low res" and "hi-res" are based on the same pixel clock. Actually, there is only one pixel clock on OCS, so this is not an art.



It became different on ECS and then AGA, but there, you cannot mix modes as you like. This is exactly why there is "mode coercion", a mechanism invented to "fake modes" into something similar to give a reasonable picture (just with wrong resolution, as pixel clocks of the intended modes do not match)

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yes, for screen dragging each screen needs to have the same horizontal scan rate, but the resolutions can be different. And we are not just talking about stretching pixels, but actual hardware differences like number of bitplanes, color palette etc. The Amiga is far more flexible here than PC graphics cards of the day.

No, and this just shows you lack knowledge. Graphics cards like the Cirrus5446 or the S3Virge (or even the S3Trio64V+) can mix different modes together, of course based on the same pixel clock, which is the same restriction for AGA and ECS. These chips are ancient and not exactly "new to the market". The reason for these engines were of course not to support screen dragging, but to support picture-in-picture functions to show a video in a window, so they are more flexible and do not only support vertical screen arragements, but rectangular or arbitrary boundaries even.



P96 even not in its latest edition supports such chips and allows you to "mix resolutions" using the features of the chip. Thus, hi-color on chunky or vice versa is not a problem for these cards. Yes, really, this stuff works.



Actually, today's graphics cards still support such features with ease, just that they implement it differently. The Cirrus had a line-switchable RAMDAC. The S3 chip has its Stream-Processor. It also supports different resolutions, BTW. Today, this mode-mixing is done with the pixel shaders of the GPU which is powerful enough to do it in real time.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

An OS feature they couldn't add with the original VGA card, and with limited success on (some) later cards.

So it seems, once again, I did with P96 the impossible, right? (-:

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It's not just a matter of changing pixel clocks, but also where to fetch data from, color palettes etc. You may be right that modern graphics cards can do this on a line by line basis, but older ones couldn't.

Even ones as old as the Cirrus or S3 can do it.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Scaling is a different thing. Now you are talking about converting different resolutions to be all the same, with results that may not be very satisfactory.

No, that is quite the same, it is just a digital filter instead of an analog filter. Actually you can define how this filter acts, on the S3 for example.


So please, get your history right. What the Amiga chipset offered back then was later on available on contemporary VGA chips as well, and it can surely be used to implement screen dragging. I know because I did exactly that.


That PCs do not provide screen dragging is not a matter of incapable hardware. It is more a matter of user demand, or the lack of it. Screen dragging was a poor men's solution to the problem of insufficient RAM bandwidth such that you had to use different compromises (more colors or higher resolution) for programs, and it was a nice metaphor to put "screens" on top of each other. But today, it makes no sense to restrict "screen movement" to vertical only. Instead, you call them windows, and you can drag them wherever you want, and whatever colors or resolutions you want.


The "shortcoming" is that the average PC "window manager" does not support the metaphor of "screens", but the hardware easily could. It is just not requested much and thus not implemented. It is a pure software restriction and a pure matter of user demand.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Not without slow CPU based code, no.

Wrong. The S3 stream processor (also in the S3Trio64V+) can do that with ease. The P-IV Cirrus can do it with ease, no CPU power required.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Full screen switching is MUCH better than windows for applications where it makes sense. This ability is anything but clumsy and would be nice to have under Windows as an addition to just ALT-TAB.

That is just a matter of software, user interface and what you are used to. The average Linux or windows user will not miss the feature. What I miss on windows is not screen dragging (I rarely need that), I miss panning aka "autoscroll". Something all VGA chips also support with ease, just window does not expose it. But, that is only me.

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by spud

David Pleasance... once a salesman, always a salesman. Tells a good story and obviously did good stuff at Commodore. Cut him some slack I say.

Agreed, when an older gentleman tells a story, more often than not there's something worth listening to amongst the tall tales!

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Even ones as old as the Cirrus or S3 can do it.

Technically all chips mentioned by you are or first or second generation of SVGA chip-sets (so they are not so old) where VGA legacy core existed almost in parallel to SVGA (and mostly undocumented).
Also there is no standard methods to access this functionality (even VESA standard was quite limited introducing VESA VBE and VESA AF quite late...).
VGA chips was usually quite limited in terms of flexibility so if we limit to VGA then all vendor unique functionality mentioned by you is not present.