I know that feeling all too well...
Probably one of the best things the CELL ever did was forcing developers to think about this stuff going into production from the off rather than write huge monolithic C++ object-based multiple-inheritance hierarchies of spaghetti code & then have tov deal...
No they used 1 PPU... Early in the generation... I can categorically state with a pretty firm degree of certainty, that nobody has shipped a game on PS3 that only uses the PPU for at least the past 2-2.5 years... Sony's APIs & toolchain have matured leaps and bounds since the consoles' inception...
The CELL certainly was a failure both from a business & strategic perspective...
However as a specific piece of technology built to solve a particular problem, it was far from it.
Sony made the best of it & in the long run it worked out for them, offering the only positive differentiator...
Our livelihood depends on people buying games...
Whether they upgrade to a new playstation or switch to an iPad doesn't really matter to me in many ways...
No they didn't... They "had" 1 dual-issue PPU & 6 SPUs...
Rubbish...
There's no way in hell you'd get similar speed ups with Xenos if you spent "vast" amounts of resources on optimizing CPU code...
The problem was that most multi-platform developers didn't "have" vast amounts of...
3GB of RAM for the OS sounds like it's applied for both system & video memory usage...
So thats vertex, texture & shader data for all OS-driven UI (always accessible from the HOME button)...
Then throw in all your kernel level constructs (can't be much more than a few hundred MBs max), throw in...