> They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.
That’s what being exotic hardware means.
It would be the same issue for whatever supercomputer code you want to run. If you don't specifically target for the Cell SPEs, you're left with a single PPE that could barely keep up with the Pentium 4s and Athlon64s at the time.
Wasn't more an issue that games didn't specifically optimize for cell processors? They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.
> to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.
There were at least three largish cluster setups, the biggest being a super computer with almost 2000 PS3s. Of course you are right, that is barely a blip on their sales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster