That sounds like a more extreme version of what the Cell[1] was supposed to be. Developers seemed to think that developing for that architecture was really painful, specially compared to other contemporary console platforms. I'd love it if the progress being made in the industry got us to actually being able to exploit the full potential of such architectures.
It was painful - mostly because we don't have good tools for that sort of thing and most of our programming sort of hides the idea of multiple CPUs and pretends it's all working at once (in terms of us writing the code anyhow).
It's all abstracted in a very linear way.
Changing all that will take a lot of time if we do.
Actually multiple CPUs are not normally hidden in mainstream programming languages [1]: i.e. threads are visible. The fiction that it is maintained by the programming languages and hardware is that of a single, coherent address space, which Cell very much did not have.
[1] outside of parallel iteration/folding constructs.
> I'd love it if the progress being made in the industry got us to actually being able to exploit the full potential of such architectures.
If they had ever released it as a general purpose computer instead of a locked down game console people could've experimented with it enough to unlock its full potential.
If they were smart they'd dust off the old chips, throw them on a RasberryPi type system and laugh all the way to the bank.
There were PCI-Express cards with Cells on them, for numbercrunching or something. These even used the "good" Cells with full 64-bit floating point numbers needed for scientific workloads.
I vaguely remember that the price tag I saw was so outrageous I can understand why that didn't go anywhere.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)