If the SPE's had been something more of general purpose, they hadn't been cheap and it couldn't have had the high floating point operations per second number, but maybe it had been a lot easier for the programmers.

ARM appears to have been slightly faster in 05-06 than I previously stated. Actually ARM's been used by smartphones since 04 (or 03?), but yeah, the smartphones rocketed the ARM development.

Exactly it was a trade off.
We need to remember the geometry sizes these chips were initially being built at, which was by modern standards massively huge.
So in order to keep costs down, the cores needed to be simple and "stupid".

Modern ARM chips seem to resemble a big and wide x86 core these days, especially Apple's CPU design.
Back then they had more in common to a narrow and slow Atom core.

Didn't Sony stop production on the Cell though? Not only that, they shut down the plant it was produced in.

It's highly unlikely that they'd restart production on old tech that they've already have fully abandoned..

The best hope for PS3 BC is emulation.

The more processing power, the better first party games can be. we know that 3rd parties wont bother as they keep their multiplats on the same level, but we could see first party games with immersive  worlds and alot more in game interactions and on screen objects. Even with this generation of consoles, it still doesn't feel like we have evolved much from last gen, aside from obvious graphical enhancements that don't mean much. 

What you describe will happen with/without Cell.

Maybe, but i still think had they gone with cell we'd have a more powerful processor on the ps4 and possibly ps5.

Had Sony actually utilized Cell in the way Kutaragi road mapped it, they would be in a better position than Apple and Google are now. If they had Cell in every Sony device, they would have gained massive support, and R&D would have continued. It would be very interesting to see an alternate path where they dropped a PlayStation Portable with Micro Cell, and delivered the high end PS3 Ken promised the A/V community.

With every Sony device, TV, Phone, Console, Portable, Reciever, Audio Deck, etc. running on some form of Cell, and a common OS things would have turned out a lot different. Sadly Sony didn't have a grasp on the company at the time, and the divisions where horrible at working together.

Moving forward they have dropped Cell and are seeing success with X86 on PS4. Hopefully Kaz has enough sway to get them unified across all divisions in the next decade. They can build an excellent ecosystem around X86 with AMD and the PS4 OS. Maybe down the road they can bing their chip development in house if they are successful enough, like we are seeing with Apple. We will probably never see anything as radical as Cell again, but it is possible with enough sway in the market.

Any continued success though is very dependent on dropping Android and ARM from their Phones and TVs, and building a Sony experience across all of their platforms. Thus the PS5 has to stick to X86 and simplicity that can scale across all of Sonys products. 

Or it might not have. Jaguar is a well balanced architecture, more so than Cell ever was.

Having it in every Sony device wouldn't have been enough.
Sony doesn't shift near enough volume in Televisions, Consoles and other Audio/Video electronics to give Cell even remotely the same amount of marketshare as say... ARM or x86 which are stupidly prolific and not vendor-exclusive.

Besides, Toshiba tried Cell in a TV. It was a colossal failure.

For Phones, Portables, Receivers and Audio equipment, MIPS and ARM fills those roles... And they only cost cents/dollars and are super low power.

Building a CPU design from the ground up is extremely capital intensive.
Plus it's now 2018, CPU's are orders-of-magnitude larger and more complex than what the Cell was, which means it would cost even more money and time to develop.

Sony simply doesn't have the resources for that anymore.

But that is also not a bad thing, AMD, Intel and ARM combined spend billions on R&D improving their designs every year, so Sony can ride on their success and innovate in other areas instead.

I disagree.
Apple isn't one of the largest technology companies on Earth because they stuck with x86 and have a degree of simplicity across all of their products.

Rather what Apple does is use the best technology available for their device.

Got a high-end Mac desktop PC? Nothing than a couple of high-end x86 processors will do.
Got a Macbook? Then an energy efficient Core processor is your best bet.
Got an iPhone? ARM is the only real option here, they are energy efficient and capable.
Got an iPad? Again. ARM.

And yet... Even despite the fact that the Mac and iPhone use different OS and processor variants... Apple provides a good experience across all it's devices.

In part this is because even the mobile OS's have so much unneeded stuff in them, it's hard to imagine - and in part you've been able to run off with "sloppy code" because of the increasingly powerful processors.

I think what Kevin means by that is, that Sony could've had this "unified Sony architecture", not that different from UWP, that could've been possible IF Sony had used Cell and custom OS (such as the YDL) on all it's devices. This actually might have fit Sony's plans for taking over the livingroom, IF even the PS3 had been successful. With the PS3 flop, I'm sure management was quite sure this was not the winning formula, moreso with the advent of tablets, that actually disrupted the Sony model with TV as a center of your livingroom (yhis is why we are seeing the Switch, as Nintendo doesn't believe anymore that TV is the center of people's livinrooms, but doesn't count it out either).

Keep in mind that Apple is in the marginal when it comes to X86 based systems, so it really doesn't matter what they are running their computers with. And even if you're providing a good experience with them, in the end, it is very marginal market they're able to reach.

They can just use a cheap Ryzen processor and get 60fps in every game easely, even the cheapest AMD Ryzen 1200 outperforms the flagship FX processors from AMD and those all still get the job done on PC, also the cell processor is a disaster to program for.