I remember the PC Gamer issue featuring the tech. You had all those old wild western town screen shots showing things like HDR lighting before HDR was a thing (or felt like it). I also remember E-DRAM (on-die embedded DRAM) that promised insane texture filling speeds. It was exciting at the time as 3D was really blowing up and realism was edging closer and closer. Though noting ever came of it, I always remembered the name Bitboys. I never knew actual hardware existed either.
I was in uni at the time and a professors son went to work for ATI working on graphics chips and I thought it must have been a dream job but the professor countered: "He says it's a boring job dragging libraries of gates into designs, verifying, debugging, and moving on" The following year I heard the son jumped ship to a gaming company doing engine work and loved it.
Around 2006 I had some automotive entertainment system from NEC on my table which had one of the Bitboys GPU chips on it. Wrote some vector graphics API for it.
It wasn't bad honestly. It supported OpenGL/ES 1.0 I only had to contact them twice for driver bugs. They resolved that within a few days.
I was in uni at the time and a professors son went to work for ATI working on graphics chips and I thought it must have been a dream job but the professor countered: "He says it's a boring job dragging libraries of gates into designs, verifying, debugging, and moving on" The following year I heard the son jumped ship to a gaming company doing engine work and loved it.