You're absolutely right of course and I stand corrected.
I was thinking of the cool, companies (Silicon Graphics, Apple, NeXT, BeOS) and high end stuff (SUN, Hewlett Packard, DEC), of the pre-WinTel era. When CPUs had one core, integrated memory and periphery controllers and even floating point co-processors weren't ubiquitous and "graphics cards" did not include a "GPU".
Acorn worked with a single company (VLSI) to produce the first ARM chips. When ARM came of age, there wasn't a complex "foundry ecosystem" where dozens of companies specialize in different stages of what results in a SoC.
i feel like the complex foundry ecosystem makes wild stuff a lot more doable now
from my perspective i see a lot of totally wild stuff, not all of it successful: yosys, esp32, fram, reram, optane, tensilica, cortex-m0 socs, padauk's fppas, gigadevice, apple's m1 and m2, graviton, tpus, ambiq's subthreshold utter insanity, stm32g, the unbelievable explosion of photovoltaic, wch's ch32v003, gallium nitride, mram, wlcsps, jlcpcb's smd assembly service, mass-market lidar chips with picosecond timing, chalcogenide pram, greenarrays, silicon carbide, modern silicon mosfets (not to mention igbts), led streetlights, petabit interconnects in data centers, nvme ssds, the zillion variations of risc-v, bitcoin mining asics, oled displays (though those aren't chips), gpgpu, submillimeter phased-array mass-market products like starlink, indium phosphide amplifiers in oscilloscopes, amorphous-silicon-on-glass products from sharp hitting the mass market (look, ma, no cog!), and skywater's open-source pdk and the associated shuttle program
so i have a hard time agreeing that "wild chip design innovations were much more common" in the 01990s than now; from my perspective that could hardly be farther from the truth
I was thinking of the cool, companies (Silicon Graphics, Apple, NeXT, BeOS) and high end stuff (SUN, Hewlett Packard, DEC), of the pre-WinTel era. When CPUs had one core, integrated memory and periphery controllers and even floating point co-processors weren't ubiquitous and "graphics cards" did not include a "GPU".
Acorn worked with a single company (VLSI) to produce the first ARM chips. When ARM came of age, there wasn't a complex "foundry ecosystem" where dozens of companies specialize in different stages of what results in a SoC.