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Lots of simple cores would be inherently better.

But much harder to program and not effective for speeding up quite a lot of software.

Isn't that exactly what made PS3 hard to develop for?

Yep. It bad to develop for, and left lots on the table compared to its contemporary Xbox 360, despite "theoretically" better specs. 1

The Cell processor was never used in any other consoles, and the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer using them ended up being replaced by Cray+AMD hardware.

1 https://kotaku.com/5885358/why-skyrim-didnt-play-nice-with-t...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner

That's the Xeon Phi concept... which is apparently being taken out back and shot.

Our current programming paradigms don't adapt well to massive parallelism, except for some small classes of "embarassingly parallel" problems (e.g., make -jN).

Most of what we do is pretty parallel: web hosting, servicing requests, databases, hosting tons of VMs and containers, etc. I don't buy it.

My guess on Phi is that it wasn't a big win over fewer deeper cores and so there was not much market. This might change things a bit.

There are also GreenArrays chips, like the GA144.[1] 144 cores on a chip.

The downside (or upside) is that they're desgined for running Forth, and are not x86 compatible.

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB001-100...

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