versatile and/or legendary chips in console history?

[SegataS]

Like we know about Motorolla 68000. SNES Sound Chip and PS3 Cell. Anything just as amazing or versatile not as talked about in the mass? What about the 1T-Sram Nintendo used for 3 consoles? You can criticize the CPU in Gamecube but Nintendo sure stretched that out as much as possible which is kind of impressive. What else is out there that impresses you or whatever. Honestly curious.

[ComradeOj]

I would cast my vote for the mos 6502. Not only for versions of it being used in the NES and Atari 2600 (and other atari systems), but also for many home computers it was found in. Pretty much the same can also be said for the Z80, maybe even more so.

[vexatious]

Assuming you're not a bot, PC hardware okay to mention? Was recently banned at Sega Xtreme for mentioning something related.

[SegataS]

Assuming you're not a bot,

I am the modern man who hides behind the mask, so no one can see my true identity!

[vexatious]

There's too much hardware to mention from my end and then there's Microsoft Chicago which makes hardware less important (in a good way).

I'd say the "Radeon 9700 Pro". Not my favorite hardware but considering it marketed 2002 it's very impressive to see game "Crysis" playable post 2006 with most visual settings enabled (you need lots of system ram to avoid swapping though). Rage 128 series very similar; it's amazing to have 32-bit color with minimal speed penalty in 1997; plus it supports 8-bit paletted textures. Too bad R300 hardware wasn't supported in MacOS 8-9... Then again too bad I can't use Nvidia Pascal in MacOS 8-9 or Chicago.

AMDs Bulldozer. I know if you cross Linux from x86_64 to bdver4 (excavator), and chroot to it from x86_64 Intel Ivy Bridge results in "illegal instruction". Excavator (fourth bulldozer revision) also has at least double L1 cache compared to Intel i7 series; 320 kilobytes L1 for four cores divided by 2 on Numa topology. Then you get AMDs optimization guide, code libraries and Open64 compiler and other documents. Too bad AMD doesn't package 7 nanometer 16 core bdver4...

IOMMU. Very neat-o starting virtual machine with dedicated hardware expansion cards (e.g. Qemu with GPU). https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-...4-start-0.html.

Surface RT. C sharp built-in with compiler (only missing 6-8 references), ARM (a real 26-bit optimized architecture), about 10 hours battery, full size USB plug, and no moving parts. It's a full desktop machine and O.S. with Office 2013 included (only macros missing). Only problem, you need a micro sd card and USB plug is very low power.

[Team Andromeda]

Some of my 'Personal' fav's would be

VDP2 - Sega Saturn. When used just did some amazing looking effects including incredible misting and water effects

SNES - Sound chip. When I 1st got Super R-Type on import I instantly could hear a massive improvement to sound and was always impressed with the music.

Acorn Archimedes - RISC CPU. Nice to see us Brits lead the world and introduced the RISC CPU. Super impressive for the time and used to love playing Pacmania on the Archimedes in school

OG XBox - MCPX. 265 sound channels with 64 of them being in surround sound with hardware Dolby Digital support was a game-changer moment. I loved throwing a grenade in Halo only to hear a Covenant go flying throw the back speakers with debris effects also coming through the each speaker.