> 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 ;-)