A beginner is definitely not going to need assembler to ship an app. It's unlikely anyone with just a few days/weeks/months of experience will be able to touch

A beginner is definitely not going to need assembler to ship an app. It's unlikely anyone with just a few days/weeks/months of experience will be able to touch what optimizing C/C++ compilers do. Mandelbrot you'd do anyways easily as a pixel shader. I'd guess it's trivial to get 60 fps full screen for something like 30 iterations. Second best option is using ARM NEON. But I doubt anyone is interested seeing another useless app in any store. Amazing performance wise on Raspberry Pi needs to be written in Videocore IV assembler. 24 Gflops there. On RPi2, you could also try NEON vector instructions, but I doubt it can hold a candle to VCIV even if using all 4 cores. And don't forget soon ARMv7 assembler is thing of a past. 64-bit ARMv8 is rather different to code for. In a few short years only place where you'll find 32-bit CPUs are cheap microcontrollers. But anyways, it really doesn't matter which CPU architecture is used for educational purposes. 6502 would do. Or heck, PDP-11. For most programmers, it's enough to just have some idea how things work under the hood.