> Every time a company has spent resources doing this, a competitor innovated on the software and made the custom hardware irrelevant.
This often happened, though not always.
An important counterexample are 3D graphics cards, which basically put the OpenGL/DirectX fixed-function pipeline into silicon. It took a long time and many iterations to make the pipeline more programmable until the 3D graphics cards turned into modern GPUs.
Even today, GPUs live on as separate hardware in a computer instead of having become integrated into, say, the CPU. Intel's attempt to do something like this with the Larrabee project [1] was discontinued.
It didn't happen for the original fixed function graphics though, CPUs kept eating their lunch every year or so with fun rendering techniques. We still use some of these techniques for 2d graphics.
Only when they became more general with shaders, and then added support for GPGPU, did it truly take off.
I think this generality is the lesson here, not the fact that GPUs are not CPUs.
This often happened, though not always.
An important counterexample are 3D graphics cards, which basically put the OpenGL/DirectX fixed-function pipeline into silicon. It took a long time and many iterations to make the pipeline more programmable until the 3D graphics cards turned into modern GPUs.
Even today, GPUs live on as separate hardware in a computer instead of having become integrated into, say, the CPU. Intel's attempt to do something like this with the Larrabee project [1] was discontinued.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larrabee_(microar...