It barely even manages to run node.js in a docker! /s

My guess would be that a lot of of embedded things like kitchen appliances tend to run touchscreens with graphical interfaces these days.

You can run a small touchscreen with an Arduino. You also don’t need a fast processor for a big touchscreen; just enough RAM and a dedicated video chip

Yeah, and that's how you get laggy user interfaces that at least I despise. Spend that 4€ on a better chip.

How did we manage non-laggy user interfaces back in 1995 when 120 MHz single core/single chip, registers slower than modern RAM, and no dedicated graphics processor was top of the line?

By writing lots of optimizations in hand optimized Assembly.

http://www.jagregory.com/abrash-zen-of-asm/

https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Assembly-Language-Systems-Pro...

And by using a highly restricted colour palette, low resolution, no anti-aliasing, etc.

By living without 20 layers of middleware.

With physical buttons instead of touch screens?

“Vive La Resolution!”

It appears for world-class 'small-screen' interface you need a couple of Linux-capable SoC chips and a decent FPGA https://xdevs.com/review/dmm6500/

It's scientifically proven that almost every post-2000 UI has slower response than a DOS input mask.

Displays with relatively simple off-board processing are common, too; you can often run a big display pretty reasonably with a 16MHz Arduino: buydisplay.com

The microarchitecture matters. Even ARM's out of order reference cores are very slow compared to intel CPUs. Now take an obsolete decade old core at mediocre 1 GHz and you suddenly have something that is cheap but also extremely slow compared to even a raspberry pi 3 which is also slow as hell.

so something it's very wrong, if a CPU at 20mhz can run softly a GUI at 800x600 and a CPU at 1ghz can't

A 1 ghz CPU absolutely can run a smooth touchscreen GUI, I think what OP meant is that it's not gonna be capable of running a snazzy Electron interface or some other trendy framework that makes everything super easy. You can't really afford the overhead that software running on a modern desktop can, so it will require a bit more work.

For reference, the original iPhone CPU was a single ARM11 core clocked at 412 MHz. Obviously it's possible, this Allwinner chip would run circles around that.

> snazzy Electron interface or some other trendy framework that makes everything super easy

Except that Electron is harder to use than pre-.NET Visual Basic, or Delphi, or especially HyperCard. All of the developer convenience of web apps, with all of the great performance of web apps!

I had smooth GUIs made with Visual Basic 3 running on my old 386@40

And my A1200 with a 68020@20 have a pretty smooth GUI

I think they are referring to the features of the SOC there. They follow it up with a mention that it doesn't have an HDMI controller on chip, I don't think it has an Ethernet controller either.

Really though, I don't think the SOC is that bare bones either.

Since quad-core Cortex-A53 chips kinda became the norm.