IBM PPC970 64bit CPU at CeBIT

[downix]

Weren't CBM thinking of making next gen Amiga's using PA-RISC processors?

Yes and no.  CBM was using the PA-RISC CPU core in their Hombre chipset.  However, there is a scenario where CBM could have wound up producing whole CPU's.  HP was looking for a company to jointly develop a lower-end version of it's PA's for the consumer/embedded range at this time, and CBM was an ideal matchup.  Making CBM an even better canidate over the competition (Intel winning out in the end) was the fact that they were already designing a consumer-oriented version of the PA-RISC Core for the Hombre chipset.(which, frankly, would have rocked and even today would not have been too out-of-place in a budget desktop, as you'll find with Voodoo's and i810 chips today)  CBM, if the Hombre design did take off, might have expand the partnership to include whole CPU's.  Would have been tres cool.

Woulda coulda shoulda, doesn't matter now.  I'd still love to see the Hombre's files tho, just to see what could have been.

But, that's just my personal opinion based on outside observation.

[downix]

Sounds interesting, what was the Hombre chipset then? AAA? Anyyone know of any links with info?

it was not AAA, it was post-AAA.  They began Hombre when it was obvious that AAA had fallen too far behind.  (actually, the origins of Hombre began with an object study to see about putting AAA and a 68k processor into a single chip for a laptop, but things evolved far since that original concept)  it did not have much in the way of legacy support for OCS/ECS/AGA.  there's a good review of it at http://amiga.emugaming.com/hombre.html.

There are a few mistakes in that review, however, as some legacy compatability did exist.  Most notably the fact that Hombre still used the AAA's audio/peripheral chip, Mary.  In addition, it still supported playfields and had added blitter modes to make a dedicated sprite engine redundant.  it did keep one sprite tho, Sprite0, which was now slaved as a mouse pointer.  

Hombre on a PCI card would have also netted Commodore sales outside of the Amiga platform, as Hombre would have compared well with the top-end chipsets from other vendors and came in at a much lower cost *and* provided features such as texture mapping and dynamic lighting that the other vendors did not add till '97 (when Hombre was slated for production in '95).  

but, it's all just a dead past now.  A shame, really.