I don’t think that’s a problem - more like it’s under-appreciated how smart it is. A lot of hardware enthusiasts like to talk about raw capabilities but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used. This is where Apple’s approach is an interesting long-term play: they have been pushing things like the Accelerate framework since the PowerPC days (when you could see e.g. MATLAB get big performance wins simply by dropping in a new BLAS library to replace the unoptimized one it shipped with) and now they’re in the unusual position of being able to line everything up on the same release schedule, too. Sun could have done that on paper but their hardware was rarely competitive and they bit off more than they could chew trying to reinvent every concept of computing portably in Java, and Microsoft has always suffered from being downstream of Intel’s decisions.

> ...but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used.

The Cell hardware didn't turn out how Sony expected either - hence adding an Nvidia GPU at the 11th hour, and bumping up the console price significantly.

I never used it on the console side but we had few pitches for HPC offerings. Back then nobody cared about the GPU but the test runs basically doomed it: the peak performance would have been nice but it required pretty massive rework of each program before the results weren’t bad and we had some memory-latency sensitive workloads which would have suffered horribly. We spent less money on Opterons which were faster on every existing app and since multiple supercomputing systems mixed the two I suspect that was a common decision.