Yes, that's it.  Too far ahead of its time.

The reason why Sony didn't go with two Cell processors was the exorbitant cost.  The machine with one Cell was expensive enough, had it included two you'd likely have been looking at the $800-$900 price range for a PS3.

With the saturation of the market no company has the ability to innovate on the hardware side. If you want the software you have to have tech that is right in line with everyone else. That is why the PS4 will be an off the shelf device with minor mods for security. It is also why the door is wide open for any company to jump in and join the foray.

Personally, I find it sad because I loved the tech race and the innovative thinking. Though on a happy note, the new battle for software mean much easier use, and more functionality. So with the bad comes the good.

The two cells no GPU approach is philosophically parallel with what John Carmack has recently preached and what AMD is developing, in that respect too far ahead of its time.

Yes, cost was the reason, that was never a mystery. (and because of cost, publishers threatened to not develope for the console, which was what ultimately created the compromise)

Considering how much games and software in general are GPU-driven these days (hence the emergence of GPGPU technology as seen in Wii U and other hardware), it's pointless to include a beast of a CPU like the Cell in a game console. Costs too much, makes developing and porting games alot tougher, and creates unnecessary bottlenecks with the rest of the hardware that is usually your standard off-the-shelf stuff modified for the console.

The cell processor is great, even with todays standards. But the rest of PS3 architecture is abysmal.

Same with the Vita, great tech on paper, but the end product suffers from poor technical design, so graphical games like Uncharted or Liberation only could use half screen resolution (so the same resolution as 3DS!) and look really disappointing for gamers who believed the "a console experience on the go" marketing line.

Sony really needs better technicians who know how to use and create really great tech for console.

IBM cancelled just the Cell with 32 APUs...  IBM never cancelled the architecture.

The rumors said the Cell used in PS3 Super Slim is the 32nm version but that is not the most advanced... there is another version not utilized by PS3 with dramatically improving double-precision floating-point performance on the SPEs from a peak of about 12.8 GFLOPS to 102.4 GFLOPS... this version in 32nm can have up to 16 cores (SPES).

Considering that the Vita has been lauded as a great piece of portable technology with, unfortunately, too few games to showcase it, I think that is only your own opinion based on nothing but wishful thinking.

You can still use the unlocked Cell in a new system with a new more powerful GPU and a lot more RAM as a gaming system. We'd be after all talking about a fully unlocked 7 SPU(8th for security) cell running at 3.2 GHz per core, and since people are more used to coding with it, with a more powerful GPU, the cell can handle a lot of many other things. They'd have to rework the memory layout though.

I wouldn't call it under utilized, it's more in line to wasted potential due to a weak GPU that it has to support other than the obvious bad memory layout. I think if they use the AMD APU, AMD'd still cheaper though, which is funny.

Since when does reducing the die size mean they've re-engineered the die?

I don't doubt that IBM was working on a 32nm die for the Cell processor.  I don't even doubt that they were working on a higher performance version of the Cell for future use, but I highly doubt either IBM or Sony would go from a stable processor in the current Cell processor to an unknown in in a Cell that utilizes performance gains and would in turn mess up the operation and function of every old game.