NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/misc-part2/13333

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 4.3 KB

Path: news.ee.vill.edu!not-for-mail
From: [e-mail] (Edward L. Hepler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: VIScorp will continue PPC project - READ!
Date: 19 Apr 1996 08:51:07 -0400
Organization: Villanova University
Message-ID: <4l827r$[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
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In article <[e-mail]>,
William F. Maddock <[e-mail]> wrote:
>On 18-Apr-96 03:06:37 [e-mail] Pacarana wrote:
>
>>  From what I gather, which certianly could be wrong, the Acutiator thing
>>  was
>>sort of a way to hack Hombre onto an AAA system. I don't think that makes
>>too much sense since we don't have AAA and wouldn't need it with were the
>>stand alone Hombre had evolvd too (unless perhaps it could hook a
>>PA-RISC/Hombre as a gfx card into a PPC system).
>
>Actually, Acutiator was intended to be a system interface protocol (kinda
>like ZorroIII on steroids), but was `abandoned' when PCI wound up doing
>pretty much the same things in addition to being adopted as an industry
>standard. As for Hombre, only one person in the entire world knows how that
>works and if I'm not mistaken, you're not him. According to Mr. Haynie,
>Hombre never got much beyond the paper stage, much less stand alone.
>

I guess I am the one person who should know.  I designed it.

Hombre was designed to be standalone in low end systems.  So systems
like set top boxes, games like CD32, and home computers like the A1200
consisted of the Hombre chips (2 chip set), memory, and in the case of
the home computer a third chip which had some peripheral interfaces which
were not included on the Hombre chip itself (floppy, SCSI, etc.)
The internal processor was an integer core of a PA-RISC processor.
The chipset also contained a CD interface, a memory interface, basic sound
capabilities with the ability to also use external sound, and interface to
external MPEG chips, and video control.  It had chunky pixels and supported
much higher resolutions than ECS or AGA (There was a mode to allow it to
support 1280 X 1024 and another for HDTV).  It had multiple playfields and
allowed things like HAM mode on all of them simultaneously.

On high end systems, Hombre was configured as an intelligent peripheral
and served an external processor.  While an external PA-RISC processor
would probably have been most compatible, there was no requirement for this.
The Hombre chipset had a PCI interface, so it could act as a peripheral
to any PCI based computer system.

I would place Hombre at more than a paper design.  A spec had been written.
Behavioral models had been written and exercised in C and M (a hardware
description language) for the CPU, the blitter/renderer, the memory interface,
and much of the DMA.   Transistor level designs had begun on the
blitter/renderer datapath and CPU datapath.  Transistor level design had
also begun on the memory to be used for the instruction and data caches
for the CPU.  Simulation had also begun for the video section. Most of the
control logic was to be synthesized directly from the behavioral models,
so you could say that they were also designed (since most were run through
a synthesis phase when they were written to make sure everything was OK).

Software was a bit behind, but we did understand the basic algorithms that
would be used for graphics (3D and texture mapping) and had a couple of
demo programs which ran on an Amiga to show what we were planning.

>
>
>William F. Maddock    www.icon-stl.net/~wmaddock     [e-mail]
>THOR #1621                      GAC  FLAK                  Editor in Chief
>              The Newsletter of the Gateway Amiga Club, Inc.
>The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the GAC or its members
>

Dr. Edward L. Hepler
  President,                     Adjunct Professor,
  VLSI Concepts, Inc.            Villanova University
    VLSI Architecture,             Teaching graduate courses:
         Design, CAD                 ECE-8445 Advanced Computer Architecture
                                     ECE-8460 VLSI Design
  [e-mail]
  [phone]                 I John 5:10-13