I think they used a gpu from imagination technology, which is one of the most common gpus in smartphones SOC. They reasoning must have been constraints of power and chip real estate. But anyway the Atom until the latest silvermont architecture had been dead on arrival pretty much. The latest Atom is definitely competitive in SPECS to any ARM SOC but the problem is there is no way either Samsung or Apple would use it so there goes 80% of the market.
yeah I remember reading about the imagination tech + low power + cost thing.
I don't know much about GPUs other than the common nvidia, ati, etc...
I don't spend money on video cards because I don't do any videos or games.
ever since 3d accelerators became common and cheap I stop paying extra for them.
I also just started SoCs, as of may of this year, so we're talking mere months.
but wouldn't it compete against raspberry pi instead?
those are selling like hot pies. I already have 5 pis and one beaglebone black (which I bought last week).