The list seems biased towards pre-2001, so I’ll toss one in: Cell. I hold that it was so ahead of its time, it dragged game devs, kicking and screaming, into the future ahead of schedule when they were forced to support the PS3 for the extended console cycle. :)
Larrabee was cute, but to this day I still have no idea what their target workload was.
Yup. Most of this was culled from a 2001 conference (so small but distinguished sample set), and you really need to read the detail to understand what they were appreciative of. It's not a good/bad thing and probably represented what they were thinking about at the time (e.g. Alpert calls out Multiflow because it influenced a processor he built). Sites even includes a backhand at VAX by calling it the example of what they didn't do in Alpha; damning with faint praise.
I haven't fired up my Cell dev board (Mercury) in a while. Prolly should do that. :-)
Larrabee was cute, but to this day I still have no idea what their target workload was.