Cell was pretty amazing, for its time. IMO, the biggest problem it faced was a dearth of good programming frameworks for using it effectively. If OpenCL had existed, at the time, that probably would've helped immensely.
In fact, I'm not the first to think this. IIRC, George Hotz (of recent notoriety involving his Tiny.AI startup) was experimenting with OpenCL on the PS3, when Sony withdrew OtherOS support and disrupted his efforts. If I'm not mistaken, that's what sent him down the spiral of legal troubles with Sony.
Lisa Su said:
(in 2001) We [IBM] started with a clean sheet of paper and sat down and tried to imagine what sort of processor we'd need five years from now." The decision that IBM, Sony, and Toshiba made was to create a CPU with an extreme focus on parallelization.
A key detail to remember is that GPU compute was in the earliest days of its infancy. GPUs were still incredibly specialized towards graphics and trying to use them for anything else was very hard and subject to heavy constraints. So, I'd say they were spot-on in identifying the trend, but just off the mark about which element of the system was best-suited to address the needs.
The article said:
The interviewer points out that Sony's PlayStation 3 is viewed as one of its least successful consoles, which is true.
Um... according to wikipedia:
Worldwide sales: 87.4 million (as of March 31, 2017)
Okay, so the PS4 has (also, according to them) now sold "106 million (as of December 31, 2019)", but I'd argue the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for consoles grew by more than that amount, between when the PS3 was Sony's leading console and when the PS4 was. So, if we grade on a curve, I'd say the PS4 was probably the loser.
The article said:
The Switch also saw Nintendo pivot to a fully Nvidia-powered SoC design for their new hybrid console focus.
The Nintendo Switch's CPU cores were designed by ARM. Nvidia made the SoC and iGPU.