fingar
They included their funding bodies because it is required by their funding agreement.
Ubuntu 16.04 and newer have a feature to auto detect if there is no hardware acceleration and can work with that. If you want fast fast, you can force to work without the nice effects.
You can safely try it out and see whether it works for your hardware.
1. It is now SiP, not SoC, because the GR8 chip incorporates 512MB RAM! System-in-Package.
2. They made changes here and there so all of the GR8 is open compared to the previous SoC. Most notably I expect the video decoding/encoding in hardware should be unable now.
3. Much smaller form factor.
4. Now has very fast NAND memory, so flash once and forget.
5. Overall they got input from developers and implemented what is needed.
6. Most important, same day Linux kernel support for the GR8 in Linus's tree. The commit was accepted a few days ago.
This one is about some old private server...
Is education so optimised that "inherited intelligence" has any actual significance?