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I've heard a few times that the Cell wasn't all that bad in terms of performance, just very difficult to program. Not sure how true that is, but ostensibly the useability is just a tooling issue. Probably not a tooling issue that can be solved short-term though.

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I did a university project with a Cell back in the day and it was awfully difficult to program. It was similar to GPGPU programming but instead of gigabytes, the SPUs had kilobytes of memory. Orchestrating the movement of data to/from SPUs was very hard to get right.

I never worked with cell or ps3, but that description reminds me a lot of working on the ps2.

The problem's more fundamental than that. The core of it is that parallelism requires explicit consideration in algorithm design.

The Cell demanded you to structure your program around small tasks that could be run in parallel across its seven vector cores. There's no getting around the fact that it's the programmer who has to break down problems to be small enough to fit on those cores without letting coordination overhead get out of control.

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