Ask HN: Would Cell Processor have Survived if OpenCL had been released earlier?

Cell, the core of PS3 and some supercomputers, is a heterogeneous processor with extraordinary design. In brief, it has 1 power core as master that can run Linux, and other 8 SPEs for numerical computation. Together they are connected with specially designed rings. Even for now, it is still a peculier design and not widely known.

I've seen comments from different sources that the root cause of Cell's failure is because the awful programmability. So comes my question. Any ideas?