TITLE : COMMODORE NEWS AUTHOR : ?? E-Mail DATE : 26/02/94 COMMODORE INKS DEAL WITH HEWLETT-PACKARD AS HP SIGNS WITH TCI The 12/6/93 issue of Electronic Engineering Times reports that Tele- Communications, Inc., (TCI cable television) has signed a letter of intent to buy as many as 100,000 "digital compression terminals" from Hewlett-Packard over the next four years. The deal involves making set-top boxes for the new 500-channel capable cable TV systems of the mid-90s. At the same time, Commodore signed a major deal to supply HP with the high- performance Amiga AGA graphics chip set. HP will adopt the Amiga CD32 game machine architecture and employ the Amiga AGA graphics chip set in its first generation set-top model. Jeff Porter, director of product development of Commodore's technology group, has acknowledged that one of the terminal prototypes demonstrated at HP's booth at the Western Cable Show held in early December used Commodore's Amiga chip set. Make no mistake: This is the best thing to happen to Commodore since the introduction of the Amiga. It will put 100,000 (or more) Amiga-based boxes in American homes. Whoever put this deal together should be made president of Commodore right now! AAA AMIGAS ARE IN THE WORKS Don't hold your breath, but AAA Amigas are under development at Commodore. Dave Haynie, CBM's top Amiga engineer, recently dropped some details about the AAA machines in a conference on Portal. Among the things he revealed: CBM hasn't decided which RISC chip will be used in future Amigas, though it will almost certainly be one from this list: PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, or HP/PA. (Note: The HP chip might now be seen to be at a political advantage, considering the recent deal Hewlett-Packard penned with Commodore for AGA chips and the CD32 architecture. See separate article for details.) The first AAA machines will ship with 680x0 processors. Hopefully the 68040 and 68060 will both be options, assuming that Motorola's silicon development keeps pace with Commodore's. For RISC, you would simply plug in a RISC CPU module. AAA chipset machines will hit the market "sometime in '94." Don't expect it for about another year, though, as a reasonable estimate. The AAA chipset consists of four custom chips: Andrea, Mary, Monica, and Linda. They are all full 32-bit chips, but Linda and Monica have a 64-bit mode. The chips support 8MB of Chip RAM in 32-bit mode, and 16MB of Chip RAM in 64-bit mode. This RAM can be DRAM or VRAM, and can actually be mixed in a system on 1MB/2MB boundaries. Andrea is the Agnus/Alice replacement. It supports the old 16-bit registers, new 32-bit registers, enhanced Blitter and Copper, Burst mode to Chip RAM, and display rates up to 110MHz. Mary is the Paula replacement. It has 8 16-bit audio channels, an enhanced floppy interface that can handle 4MB floppies, 150KB/s CD-ROM, and probably even old ST-506 hard disks. CD-ROM support in the AAA chip set was a freebie. The Mary chip has a few data formats, as low-level data formats, one of which is the CD-ROM format. While 4x CD-ROMs should be coming soon, and CD-ROM on SCSI as the standard way in a high-end machine, the CD-ROM format through the floppy interface does illustrate how fast the floppy interface is now. Linda is a smart Line Buffer chip. It takes data from Chip RAM, as directed by Andrea, and assembles it into a scan line. This allows bursts from Chip RAM to go long, and allows the chip bus rate to be decoupled from the pixel speed. Monica is the Denise/Lisa replacement. This handles a variety of planar and chunky display modes, HAM and some new compressed mode included. It can handle all kinds of resolutions, and with the variable pixel clock, they can be just about anything you want, assuming the system can provide that clock.