One way to think of it is as an enhanced version of the Atari 2600 graphics chip with a sort of primitive "GPU" put in front of it to offload the "racing the be

One way to think of it is as an enhanced version of the Atari 2600 graphics chip with a sort of primitive "GPU" put in front of it to offload the "racing the beam" stuff. Amiga "copper lists" later generalized the concept to drive a larger array of relatively simple specialized I/O chips (presumably due to Jay Miner).