Cell was a failure, made evident by the fact nobody has tried to use it since. Comparing the SPEs to compute shaders is reasonable but ignores what they were f

Cell was a failure, made evident by the fact nobody has tried to use it since. Comparing the SPEs to compute shaders is reasonable but ignores what they were for. Compute shaders are almost exclusively used for graphics in games. Sony was asking people to implement gameplay code on them. The idea the PS3 was designed around did not match the reality of games. They were difficult to work with, and taking full advantage of the SPEs was very challenging. Games are still very serial programs. The vast majority of the CPU work can't be moved to the SPUs like it was dreamed. Very often games were left with a few trivially parallel numerical bits of code on the SPEs, but stuck with the anemic PPE core for everything else.