Yeah lol
Cell was certainly overhyped when it came to be known. No doubt it is still a powerful processor when applications are specifically coded for it as it is best in number crunching tasks and can beat majority of desktop cpus in floating point calculations in single-precision.
I was reading that for [email protected], it's single-precision performance is around 200GFlops. However it takes a performance hit in double-precision and can only churn out around 18GFlops.
Now say take 6990 which is capable of 5.10 TFlops in single-precision (stock speed)
If we compare cell with 6990 in that regard, then 6990 is 25 times more powerful than cell in floating point calculations. Ofcourse there will be other factors to take into account such as architecture, etc.
Yeah, I mean when the PS3 came out it was like "Wow, that thing is pretty darn powerful" (for a console). It was effcient, and cost effective. It was also very good at number crunching as you say, as proven by the Folding@Home saga on PS3. Though when it was labled "A Supercomputer", that was a joke. It was nothing of the sort, and it was also very quickly outperformed by desktop CPUs. When I hear game developers banging on about the "power of Cell", honestly, it's a load of marketing BS to make people think their PS3 is "still" very powerful, when it really isn't.
Really, the same can be said for the Xbox 360's CPU, though Microsoft didn't boast about it too much (thank goodness). At the time, a tripple core CPU @ 3.2GHz in a console was like Wow! Now however, a tripple core means nothing, it's architecture is outdated and I have no doubt a newer single core would out-perform it.