I was probably not the first to have to do that, we knew what apps our customers used, making them better was the whole point of the operation

I did the architectural design for the SuperMac cards. I figured out what needed to be accelerated, dropping code into people's machines to see where the cycles were going. Others did the physical design for the first 2 cards, I did the design of the chip in the Thunder and later cards (designed the data paths and state machines and a full simulation, someone else actually laid the gates)

If your card has a SQD01 on it it's my work. It peaks at 1.5Gb/s on solid fills