The Cell has one PowerPC core ("PPU"), which is a general purpose PowerPC processor. Nothing exotic at all about programming it. But then you have 6 (for the Playstation 3) or 8 (other computers) "SPE" cores that you can program. Transferring data to/from them is a pain, they have small working memories (256k each), and you can't use all C++ features on them (no C++ exceptions, thus can't use most of the STL). They also have poor speed for double-precision floats.

I find the most useful parts of the STL, don't even use exceptions. It just has a lot of undefined behaviors. There is only one call, at, for vectors and deques that will throw a exception directly. The STL is mostly concerned with being exception safe. Do you have a reference for C++ programming the cell processor concerning the exceptions?