So where did the PPC amiga thing come from?

[Hammer]

That's not really relevant, those are for running typically DOS apps on the amiga without going through emulation, and has nothing to do with being "real roots" of Amiga at all. Same type of cards also existed for Macs and Atari, for example.

IIRC, Commodore engineers were looking at going PA-RISC after m68k, PowerPC at the time did not exist yet.

PowerPC was introduced sometime in 1992.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
"In 1991, the PowerPC was just one facet of a larger alliance among these three companies".

[Hammer]

That's not really relevant, those are for running typically DOS apps on the amiga without going through emulation, and has nothing to do with being "real roots" of Amiga at all. Same type of cards also existed for Macs and Atari, for example.

IIRC, Commodore engineers were looking at going PA-RISC after m68k, PowerPC at the time did not exist yet.

1992 = PowerPC

[Hammer]

Allow me to elaborate.

Back in the day, we were all hailing the 68060 as the holy grail, but let's not forget that it actually arrived late and with lower performance compared to the Pentium (particularly in floating point terms). It was clear to everybody back then that the 68K was falling behind. When apple introduced the first PowerMacs, people started talking about the possibility of making the same jump (the PA RISC idea pretty much died with Commodore). Amongst those people were Phase5.

All?

Due to cheap hardware cost, I switch to Intel Pentium Classic 150Mhz after my Amiga 3000/030 @25Mhz.

The PowerPC was seen as an obvious choice back then as RISC was still seen as the future (which indeed it was, but just not in the way it was envisaged), it shared the same native endian representation as 68K, supported the same basic datatypes (except for long double).

During that time, there are RISC processors i.e. from ACE camp it's MIPS or DEC Alpha.

From Amiga mags, Newtek(?) was promoting DEC Alpha(?) based Raptor workstations.

[Hammer]

I certainly do. By the time that a move to PPC was considered the 68K was a dead issue. X86 was still pretty primitive and thank god the didn't go to PA RISC.

Even now, PPC is capable of producing competitive, competent performance.

C= Amiga PA-RISC might lead to C= Amiga Intel Itanium.

Intel Itanium was designed to replace Intel's own X86 CPUs, but AMD64 (X86-64) hammered Intel Itanium in X86 software protection and sales volume. Also, AMD64 hammered any shift towards non-X86 64bit ISA e.g. PowerPC 970.

The battle is between two large OEM/ODM clone armies of X86 vs ARM. Other CPU ISAs will be caught in the crossfire.