The problem I see is that those iterations are constrained to not touch core parts of the hardware due to the lack of code and documentation being out there in public. Working with existing SOCs in different ways than their manufacturers ever thought possible is pretty common, many in the Linux-Sunxi community have pushed the envelope on how little power some SOCs can use, made possible in part by hardware features like a tiny, slow, power sipping RISC core that was on most Allwinner chips but was never leveraged before.