Had a heterogeneous programming class, where we had to implement various things on the PS3, like a basic MPEG-ish encoder and such.

Was an interesting experience, though all I remember now is how it required careful exploitation of the vector units in the SPEs to get any decent performance out of it, and how annoying it was to synchronize between the SPEs and the PPE.

For each assignment the prof would include a benchmark, so we could compare the performance in class. Was a huge difference between the students that spent time optimizing and those which did a basic implementation.