> Cell required Assembly programming Demoscene skill level to make good use of them, there was a C sdk, but really you wanted to write Assembly, and relatively tricky Assembly at it.
> It is one of the reasons why Playstation 3 is the less celebrated one, and the console generation where XBox was able to pull ahead.
In retrospect, Cell was a great architecture. In typical Sony fashion it was simply a few years too early. At the time games were single-threaded and many console games still expected CPU and GPU to be in sync.
On the PS2, the difference between using the vector accelerator or not was 1.4x – many developers never bothered. But on the PS3 this was simply not an option, as the performance difference was 6x (!).
The big issue at the time was dev tooling. Most existing engines had no support for dispatching jobs or any form of pipelining. Adding that required redesigning the engine from the ground up. On top of that the dispatcher/manager and the jobs use two different µarchs. Obviously, game and engine developers at the time hated cell with a passion.[1]
But even on the PC and Xbox, frequency scaling ended with the Pentium 4. Multi-core CPUs became mainstream. As CPUs stalled, most of the performance increase on PCs came from GPUs, that had moved from a fixed-function pipeline to shaders.
Slowly, even PC games had to do the bulk of their work in jobs dispatched across multiple cores. Engines that had adapted to Cell got a massive head start.
Today, the very textbook for game development – "Game Engine Architecture", written by Jason Gregory – uses the architecture of the Uncharted games on PS3 as the prime example for how to build a modern engine. As result, nowadays even small indie games are built that way.[2]
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1. Gabe Newell: "Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits. There's nothing there that you're going to apply to anything else" https://www.wired.com/2007/10/valves-gabe-new/
2. e.g., Tiny Glade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jusWW2pPnA0.