The challenge was not rigging this up - but making things usable & efficient. The Cell Broadband Engine was notoriously hard in architecture & needed lots of optimization.
Part of the reason why PS4 & Xbox later pivoted towards x86-64 ISA
If you were building a supercomputer the CBE’s peculiarities (specifically the SPEs) were what you wanted.
And the 360 didn’t use SPEs, it has a pretty standard 3-core CPU built out of the PPE. The weird-ass structure of the CBE was not why it switched (although PPC might be).
In my naive understanding, instead of modern SIMD type execution they were using some form of token passing between cores to execute instructions async. That made programming such multicore APUs pretty hard for the programmer. They had a SDK for mitigating some of these pain points. I could be somewhat wrong on the specifics (and the fact I last touched any architecture related topic about a decade ago).Please correct me if I am wrong.
Part of the reason why PS4 & Xbox later pivoted towards x86-64 ISA