If you were Nvidia .....

[rendezvous]

Here is the thing, Nvidia would not go to any lengths to devote resources to any project for a second party without a contract. They would not go so far as to design a GPU on a hand shake. As a publicly traded company nV has an obligation to report any and all material business dealings in a timely manner.

But we will never know about the majority of Nvidia's contracts. There may have been contracts where Nvidia have had to complete certain parts of the RSX design to get the final contract. I would believe that they would have started working on the design well before the final contract was agreed on by both parts. 2002 seems to be a bit early for a RSX specific design though.

As a side note, how large would the contracts need to be for them to need to be reported, and what is considered to be "in a timely manner"?

As for what nV may have cooked up for the RSX, only time will tell, but I think it is something more that a just a NV4X with a FlexIO interface.