chipset question

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AAA was abandoned because it was too little too late... Had it been out in 90/91, it would have been a killer... But by 1994 (or possibly the earliest date of release would have been 1995 according to DH), it was horribly out of date... It offered nothing over off-the-shelf graphics chips and did so at significantly greater cost.

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Thanks bloodline,
That's kind of the point I've been trying to make.
AAA would not offer anything we couldn't get with RTG.
And as Matt has pointed out, we don't have the specs for it.

I'm sure Dave H did post a list of planned features, commodore did get as far as some early silicon!

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Possibly used in those Walker prototypes?
And AmigaForever supposedly has a mode you can play with supporting this stuff.
I don't know how well it works though.
And I doubt it would be an improvement over a Voodoo3.

No, the AAA silicon was only part functional and was being worked up by Dave Haynie and some other Commodore engineers just before the bankruptcy, but was canceled so that attention could be focused on the Hombre Chipset, which was not Amiga Compatible but vastly superior to AAA. Had any of the commodore R&D been restarted, it would have been Hombre, not AAA that would have been developed.

Walker was basically an 030 based A1200 with some modern expansion busses like PCI and newer IDE etc...


-edit- a nice link to Hombre Chipset: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset as you can see it goes in a different direction to the Amiga and AAA, and is basically like a modern gfx chip.

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Here is the AAA spec from the guy who designed it:

http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/nyx/docs/AAA.pdf

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And a AAA (or any other future "Amiga") system architecture document, if you can be bothered to read it

http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/acutiatr/docs/acu1.pdf

Even though this document is from 1991/2, Commodore never managed to get there, and we were left with the AA (AGA in European speak) chipset forever more.

-edit- It is interesting to note that AAA was ECS compatible, not AGA compatible... It wasn't considered worth supporting the AGA feature set as it was basically just a stopgap solution.

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PA-RISC?
Man, what a change.
Why was Haynie still working on AAA when Hombre' was in development?
In a PCI implementation, Hombre' could have breathed some life into the OS again.
And WinNT long before WinXT made the NT kernel common, too cool.

So guys, why are we PPC supporters so far off?
68K emulation, RISC, and discrete graphics?
Why don't you guys join US?
Even Commodore was giving up on extending the original Amiga architecture.

AAA and Hombre projects were running in parallel with the idea that the Amiga would be AAA powered and Hombre would be the next gen machine, possibly moving the Amiga platform (I.e. the OS) over to Hombre if anyone still cared about it... For Commodore Hombre and Win NT was the future platform (with cheap Hombre consoles covering the home market).


-edit- quick note to point out that PA-RISC was nothing like PPC. IIRC went on to become the Intel Itanium architecture... Could be off base about that...

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ALL RISC shares some similarity.
Sounds like Hombre could have helped Commodore survive.
AAA was to little, too late.
And Motorola didn't intend to continue development of the 68K.
 `

Well, I'm not fan of PPC... I think it is bloated and feels like a compromise design. MIPS and ARM are much more beautiful IMHO. I know virtually nothing about PA-RISC, but I do know that Hombre planned to use several small PA-RISC cores as standard :-)

Hombre might have saved Commodore, but it would just have likely spelled the end for the Amiga... Which would have been relegated to the C64 position in the product line up.