[FirmwareBurner]

IIRC the Cell architecture was OK-ish for a CPU architecture, just that the PS3 was too gimped on RAM(256MB) for game devs to use to its full potential. The trojan Blu-ray Player actually worked in its favor.

The big issue with the Cell architecture is that it was designed to act as a GPU as well which they realized later in development that it won't be powerful enough for those graphics and they'll still need a dedicated GPU in addition. That's why the Cell is such a franken-cpu compared to the vanilla IBM PowerPC it's based on.

The Cell architecture was also a product of it's time. In the early 00s when they started Cell development nobody would have expected that X86 would have made such leaps by the time the PS3 hit the market.

[jonhohle]

Every console chose PowerPC that generation. It definitely wasn’t obvious to anyone (except maybe Apple), that the architecture was reaching it’s commercial limit.