[dlcarrier]

Even the slower ones are more like a Wii U, which is perfectly capable of everything a set-top box needs to do. Really, the hardware acceleration does all of the heavy lifting, and the processor only needs to render text and coordinate what to composite.

It's the bloat of the software layer on top that's slowing things down.

A 1st-generation Chromecast only has 512 MB pf RAM and a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor, and it can handle video streaming just fine. Building an interface on top of that doesn't take a lot of resources, if the underlying layers aren't bloated. With current Android/iOS development, they very much are.