IIRC it was just architecture quirk of those chips as initally they were designed as basically fancy accelerators to be used with already existing systems > Vi

IIRC it was just architecture quirk of those chips as initally they were designed as basically fancy accelerators to be used with already existing systems > VideoCore chips can run complete applications - they are not simply video DSP chips that require a separate processor to supply and collect data. In practice though, they are often used like simple accelerators, as companies usually prefer to cautiously assimilate new technology rather than take a big risk in porting a large amount of application code from an existing ARM-based design. For example one of earlier ones was used as GPU for Nokia N8