> almost all ventures into specialty hardware ended up with mainstream consumer CPUs catching up
All except for... 3D rendering, image compositing, video encoding, and video decoding?
I'm really struggling to see what you're trying to argue, because we do have multiple meaningful brute-force tasks that most computers today ship with dedicated silicon for.
Yes we can do more real-time audio processing I guess, but that's mainly because CPU speeds increased, not because "people learned how things really worked", or am I missing something?
All except for... 3D rendering, image compositing, video encoding, and video decoding?
I'm really struggling to see what you're trying to argue, because we do have multiple meaningful brute-force tasks that most computers today ship with dedicated silicon for.
Yes we can do more real-time audio processing I guess, but that's mainly because CPU speeds increased, not because "people learned how things really worked", or am I missing something?