This processor was an overlooked beast. At its heart was a 64-bit 
core was developed by Apple, IBM, and Motorola became known as the AIM alliance [Wiki], with Enhanced RISC, with dual-issue in-order two-way simultaneous-multithreaded CPU core with a 23-stage pipeline acting as the controller for the eight SPEs, which handle most of the computational workload It was developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI" [Wiki]. In 2006 Sony released its 
3, with 
a 2.8 GHz board that will deliver about 180 GFlops, while Clearspeed rates its CSX600 processor-based board at about 50 GFlops.
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Mercury has built a CAB, CELL Accelerator Board, on a PCI Express ATX form factor. Another example is Clearspeed's PCI-X accelerator board. Mercury says that its Cell systems will deliver about 15-30 times the floating point performance and in some scientific applications may be up to 100 times faster. Since floating point performance playsa critical role in flight simulation programming where you must continually do things like 3-D transforms, and other floating-point processes, the CELL fits in very nicely. In fact, DARPA got into the act with their Off-Road challenge! there was a winning team "Axion Racing" who used several PS3s and Yellow Dog Linux in an autonomous off-road vehicle.
The biggest problem that the CELL was up against was itself, as it was a pain in the you-know-what-to program. The PS3 lived for one year and then died. ~~ RIP
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