It has somewhat worked out for GPUs, if you phrase it more charitably (eg "our chip needs specialized compilers and programming languages to perfom well, but wi

It has somewhat worked out for GPUs, if you phrase it more charitably (eg "our chip needs specialized compilers and programming languages to perfom well, but will pay off well enough that a critical mass of developers will use them"). Not that GPUs and their proprietary fragmented & buggy tooling are that nice for developers even now, 15-20 years into the attempt, and the vast majority of apps still don't bother with it. And of course the whole GPGPU thing was just riding on the wing of gaming for most of its existence so had a really long artificial runway.