8 years ago
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Remembering Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world—but didn’t
In the Wild West of Silicon Valley startups of the late 1990s, one little company looked like it might accomplish something incredible. VM Labs had some of the best engineering talent in the world, an explosive mix of bright young minds with burning ambition and experienced old hands who once held key positions in companies such as Atari, Sony, and Sega. Their business revolved around a little chunk of silicon codenamed "Project X.” Later, they officially named their dream chip the Nuon.
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http://arstechnica.com
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Reminds me quite a bit of Transmeta. I looked forward to them releasing chips. Once they did, they quickly burned out. Loved the code-morphing concept of the VLIW Core and all of the capabilities that brought (native byte code execution of different instruction sets). Alas, they went under.
I remember seeing ads for Nuon technology in all the gaming and tech magazines at the time. The problem I foresaw was that the controllers would be pretty crappy, and sure enough, they were. The price differential mentioned in the article was also a big problem; DVD tech was already super expensive and adding Nuon tech jacked that up even further. It just missed out on the potential by being too advanced for its time, which was also mentioned in the article, but still sad to see.