Both the Cell and the Xenon are around 7 years old now and the POWER4-based PowerPC 970, their direct ancestor, is over 9 years old. They're not ancient in the

Both the Cell and the Xenon are around 7 years old now and the POWER4-based PowerPC 970, their direct ancestor, is over 9 years old. They're not ancient in the sense of a Z80 being ancient but since the PPC970's inception IBM has itself iterated the Power architecture 3 more times (the current generation is POWER7), not to mention the strides that AMD and Intel have both made in processor architectures since that time.