> but by the time it launched on the market in 2005, X86_64 was the new undisputed king of CPU performance PS3 Cell could do about 154 GFLOPs across it's 7 cor

> but by the time it launched on the market in 2005, X86_64 was the new undisputed king of CPU performance PS3 Cell could do about 154 GFLOPs across it's 7 cores (6 SPUs and 1 PPU, excluding the GPU), while Xeons were in the low double digits. What really was awkward about the Cell architecture was the DSP-style nature of it, which works great for something like shaders or audio processing with a clear pipeline, but not for general purpose computation. It was really a successor to the PS2 in this regard, where data flowed between specialized and memory constrained processors using a DMA. > Sony nor anyone else expected the consumer CPU and GPU industry to evolve so quickly in that time PS3 used an NVidia GPU. Though there was some clunkiness around sharing memory between the Cell and GPU compared to the UMA on PS4, but not especially so compared to a graphics card on a desktop machine.