I’m not even sure that’s entirely true either though. By the end of the PS3 generation, people had gotten to grips with it and were pushing it far further than first assumed possible. If you watch the GDC talks, it seemed to me that people were happy enough with it by that point (relatively speaking at least) and were able to squeeze quite a bit of performance out of it. It seems that it was hated for the first while of its life because developers hadn’t settled on a good model for programming it but by the end task based concurrency like we have now started to gain popularity (eg see the naughty dog engine talk).

Is cell really so different from computer shaders with something like Vulkan? I feel if a performance-competitive cell were made today, it might not receive so much hate, as people today are more prepared for its flavour of programming. Nowadays we have 8 to 16 cores, more on P/E setups, vastly more on workstation/server setups, and we have gpu’s and low level gpu APIs. Cell came out in a time when dual core was the norm and engines still did multi threading by having a graphics thread and a logic thread.