People forget that this was 2006. CUDA was not invented yet. And arguably didn't take off until Alexnet. NVIDIA had not even released the API for writing vec

People forget that this was 2006. CUDA was not invented yet. And arguably didn't take off until Alexnet. NVIDIA had not even released the API for writing vectorised C code yet. Hence all those 2007 supercomputer stories. They actually had a genuine use, because the Cell was fully implemented into the Linux kernel by IBM. These guys did incredibly well for their time, and they were entirely right about vectorised code. They were just superseded by the longer term trend of tying together multiple silicon dies and ASICs for HPC.