“Five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars!” Aside from the (relatively) astronomical price, the PS3 was also infamous for its CPU, which was notoriously difficult to program for. Now, thirteen years after its inception, devs are waxing poetic about the Cell Broadband Engine: in a recent interview with Game Informer, Guerrilla Games’s (Killzone, Horizon Zero Dawn) co-director and technical director Michiel van der Leeuw claimed that the Cell CPU is actually more powerful than today’s fastest Intel processors. Apparently, nobody figured out how to utilize its full potential.
Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary.