> you'll find it'll do rather well on AltiVec stuff, probably
> better than any other PowerPC.

I can imagine that in this regard both the in-order POWER6 and the out-of-order POWER7 surpass the Cell PPE (as well as the Xenon/XCGPU for that matter).

> the whole "Cell is difficult to program" was a FUD campaign
> by IBM's competitors.

I think that also the competitors of IBM's customer/partner Sony, who are IBM customers as well (but for other products), may have had good reasons to take part in such a campaign ;-)