The SPUs on the Cell were closer in concept to DSPs than they are to what the article describes. The Cell chip itself was essentially a general-purpose CPU joi

The SPUs on the Cell were closer in concept to DSPs than they are to what the article describes. The Cell chip itself was essentially a general-purpose CPU joined in silicon to several DSPs. The SPUs are still designed for sequential processing of memory, just smaller, discrete blocks. The whole chip is orchestrated by a standard von Neumann processor anyway, so that acts as a bottleneck to keeping the SPUs busy.