One thing that made it practical to work with was that we could install Linux on a PS3.
When Sony retroactively killed the ability to install Linux, they did more than make PS3 irrelevant to supercomputing. They made me deeply skeptical of relying on a technology with a single-vendor gatekeeper.
I'd love to poke into it myself. The only barrier is the language you have to use to speak with it.
But on benchmark levels Cell would be competing on different grounds to an X64 and a few PCIe slots right? I've not a clue, I'm curious but I know I don't really know what I'm talking about after this point.
the cell really taught them the trade off between latancy and throughput. That by batching up computations they could do orders of magnitude more than naive pipelining. But, to get that good batching, they had to compromise on framerate.
Which gets to the second big takeaway, which was that standard deviation in the framerate was more important than the framerate and by keeping the framerate low they could also drastically reduce standard deviation in the framerate (Incidently I understand that this was something the amiga demoscene really understood, and low S.D. was a must for any text marquee to look completely smooth).
It was a different world though, PowerPC was still alive and strong back then.
The PS4 does continue the trend but I think that's more a question of time and investment rather than pure tech considering they have a steady trickle of top notch exclusives.