They should have sold a datacenter version, without the optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS license of $200 (or at least under $1,000).
It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded.
It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded.
Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So by the time they had ramped up the capacity to make enough to meet PS3 demand, there were several years of worse/less performant PS3 versions of games developed for multiple platforms, making Sony's console look worse. It would have been a tough sell internally for the PS4 to use a custom processor architecture again, so they opted not to. This must have soured Sony's opinion of the Cell processor overall.
From the wiki: "The introductory design is fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process, with initial volume production slated for IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York."
AMD did this for Intel up to the 286. Sony should have insisted upon a tidal wave of wafers, if needed.
Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell and special ways to squeeze out performance.
It has some details on the awkward position the IBM developers were put in.
Rodrigo Copetti's excellent articles on the PS3[1] and Xbox 360 [2]
and Ars' Hannibal's article on the Xenon Chip. [3]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6056634
[1] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/