[gsliepen]

Well, they probably didn't have a choice in which GPU to use. You choose a SoC and then you are stuck with everything it comes with. What is most amazing is that they put in the effort to make a completely open source, upstreamed driver for its GPU.

I see only two possible paths for another GPU on RPis in the future: either Broadcom drops the VideoCore GPU and switches to Mali or Adreno (which I think is unlikely), or RPi stops using Broadcom SoCs and switches to something completely different. Still unlikely, but now that they have the RP1 chip taking over most of the I/O functions, it would not be too hard for them to change and still make boards that retain compatibility with existing hats.

Still, the RPi is made at a certain pricepoint, which very likely precludes putting in a flagship SoC, so even if they change, I'm not sure it will do wonders for GPU performance.