Xenon is a pretty standard SMP design, having 3 cores is basically the height of its oddity. It was a fine early-multicore CPU for consoles.
The Cell was very much not that, the SPEs were unnecessarily difficult to use for a console and ultimately a dead end though they made for great supercomputing elements before GPGPU really took off (some people built supercomputers out of PS3s clusters as that was literally the cheapest way to get cells).
The Cell supposedly cost 400 millions to develop, a cost largely borne by Sony. MS got IBM to retune the PPE for Xenon, but they'd likely have made do with an other IBM core as their base had that not existed.
This claim that the SPEs were difficult to use and maximize may have been true in the early years, but all of the major engines were optimized to quickly abstract them. Naughty Dog, a key contributor to the PS3 graphics libraries had optimized them so much that porting PS3 games to the PS4 was "hell" in their words.
>I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’, but no,” Druckmann said. "We expected it to be hell, and it was hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds...that took a long time. These engineers are some of the best in the industry' and they optimized the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically. It was optimized on a binary level, but after shifting those things over, you have to go back to the high level, make sure the systems are intact, and optimize it again. "I can’t describe how difficult a task that is. And once it’s running well, you’re running the [versions] side by side to make sure you didn’t screw something up in the process, like physics being slightly off, which throws the game off, or lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it’s a drastically different look. That’s not improved any more; that’s different. We want to stay faithful while being better.”
> This claim that the SPEs were difficult to use and maximize may have been true in the early years
The 7th gen appropriately "lasted" 7 years, "the early years" was a ton of it.
> Naughty Dog, a key contributor to the PS3 graphics libraries
ND is a first party studio, that means access to information and efforts to push the platform most developers can't justify, especially as third parties would usually need cross-platform support: the PS3 was no PS2.
> so much that porting PS3 games to the PS4 was "hell"
Which proves the point: the PS3's Cell was an expensive, unnecessarily complicated, and divergent dead end.
Remember that Naughty Dog was acquired by Sony, thus access to internal info, and until Sony released Phyre Engine, and the GT demoed what was possible with the PS3, most studios were kind of lost targeting it.
The Cell was very much not that, the SPEs were unnecessarily difficult to use for a console and ultimately a dead end though they made for great supercomputing elements before GPGPU really took off (some people built supercomputers out of PS3s clusters as that was literally the cheapest way to get cells).
The Cell supposedly cost 400 millions to develop, a cost largely borne by Sony. MS got IBM to retune the PPE for Xenon, but they'd likely have made do with an other IBM core as their base had that not existed.