There was a time when companies and research labs bought Sony PS2 (and the PS3) to build supercomputer clusters. Japan placed export controls on the PS2 because they had militarily-useful computing power. According to DIA report 4,000 PS2 units had been purchased in the United States and shipped to Iraq in just 2-3 months during 2000.
I can't imagine what general purpose software they'd have wanted to run on a PlayStation 2 from 2000 that they couldn't run on a general purpose laptop in 2004.
But these days, consoles aren't sold below cost, and gigabit network isn't fast enough to make cluster computing make sense
A 64 bit MIPS processor that can run linux + networking for 299$.
I know is not exactly the same but how much was a SGI workstation 20k? 40k? 80k?
If the PS5 had a Nvidia A100 the comparasion would make sense and people would be buying them to create clusters, like they did with the PS2 and 3.