The cell wasn't meant to be the main cpu at any point. It was thought that it could be the GPU. Sony out a separate GPU in later and left the CPU, GPU and cel

The cell wasn't meant to be the main cpu at any point. It was thought that it could be the GPU. Sony out a separate GPU in later and left the CPU, GPU and cell all mixed together. Also a lot of great stuff was eventually done with the cell. Hacks and tricks are great in small quantities, but the reality was that the cell had lots of power and potential, but sony have developers practically nothing to start. The documentation and examples were supposedly basically nothing. Even for the CPU and Nvidia GPU each game studio had to come up with their own low level drawing. Studios were really starting from scratch with very little help from Sony. Add in that supposedly the cell required fine grained cache control and scheduling, and suddenly it starts to make sense why it left lots of studios frustrated. Sony marketed its power and then left studios to spin their wheels trying to live up to consumer's expectations.