Yeah, if linux gaming does take off the story of the development of this chip might be have the trappings of “Pirates of Silicon Valley” story one day, at least to techies.

It would be interesting to get the details of how this all went down considering about a year before Van Gogh, at the beginning of 2020, there was a rumor that Apple was going to make a 5000 dollar gaming mac (that would sorta slot into where the mac studio is now). If the “gaming mac” portion of the rumor is true, that potentially raises more questions like if Apple might have wanted to keep designing x86_64 macs, and if AMD was shopping the idea of this chip to a number of parties or who put money in the development of this chip and when (as you pointed out). Again not because theres something nefarious going on, but just because it seems like a great story.

Kinda like how Nintendo basically created the PlayStation, and then abandoned it pre launch, leaving Sony with a almost finished competing product.

I guess in the gaming industry you shouldn't kill your darlings?

That's not really what happened. Nintendo was working with Sony to create a CD add-on for the SNES. As a part of that deal Sony was making a version of the SNES that included the CD drive add-on called the PlayStation similar to how Sharp made the Twin Famicom that incorporated the Famicom Disk System. Nintendo realized the deal with Sony would give Sony too much control over CD games so they scrapped it and went with Philips (which is how they got to make those bad Nintendo CDi games). In the end a SNES CD add-on was never released.

Sony was pretty pissed off when Nintendo announced they were going to be partnering with Philips when they thought Nintendo was going to be announcing they were working with Sony. So they ended up entering the gaming market to compete with Nintendo. However the PlayStation they came up with was an entirely new design focused on 3D graphics.

Just to add, the CD add-on to the SNES would have added CD-based audio and presumably larger/cheaper games, but would have added no additional computing power. None of the playstation hardware was based on this product.

Isn't that akin to what happened with Cell and IBM/Sony? With Microsoft and the 360 benefiting from the same work but dropping the SPEs? Details are fuzzy for me so I might be misstating things but I always found that to be quite a fascinating tale of technology.