I worked on the Sony cell tool support before it was released. Besides the great point scott_s mentions, the Cell never lived up to the hype. The (original) h

I worked on the Sony cell tool support before it was released. Besides the great point scott_s mentions, the Cell never lived up to the hype. The (original) hype that got people excited was: dual-thread dual-issue 4.0 GHz PowerPC code + 8 SPUs. Reality was: a 3.2 GHz processor with performance crippling bugs (load-hit-store was one), 7 SPE but really only 5 (one was hardwired to the OS, another to sound processing). The SPE had even worse bugs that made branches absurdly expensive. If that wasn't enough, developers balked at the cache penalty of 64-bit code so Sony imposed a truly mindboggling terrible 32-bit mode that didn't use the physical 32-bit mode but instead effectively emulated it (effectively all arithmetics need to truncate to 32-bit). Finally, the whole inter-SPU communication primitives were way more expensive than they should have been. There's more, but I have willfully flushed it from memory. Cell was a failed design that deserved to die. I will forever after be skeptical of "heterogeneous" designs like these.