[kuschku]

It was basically an all-purpose vector computing monster focused on SIMD. You could use it for physics simulations, animations, tesselation, etc. Basically everything you'd use a compute shader for nowadays.

That's why emulators need AVX512 support to match the PS3. It was incredibly powerful.

Obviously, in that era's single-threaded world no engine could make use of that functionality and few knew how to program for it. It was ahead of its time, by quite a while.

[fl0ki]

Remember around that time when the industry said that OpenCL would allow write-once run-everywhere compute code for a booming industry of diverse and competitive compute devices? I fell for that scam for a couple of years, before very fortunately getting a different job for long enough to watch the collapse from a safe distance.