reMarkable 1 is 1GHz single-core with 512MB of RAM, and that’s entirely sufficient for what it’s primarily designed for, writing. PDF rendering is the main thing that can be slow, agonisingly so in some cases. I imagine that’s the main reason why they boosted reMarkable 2 to dual-core 1.2GHz and 1GB of RAM. (It wasn’t for things like startup time—https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jfgpqw/rm... shows both 1 and 2 taking about 20 seconds, with 2 actually the slower by a second or so.)

Quad-core 1.8–2GHz and 4GB of RAM is, if used fairly sensibly, massive overkill for most purposes e-paper has been used for so far, with image-heavy PDFs being the most likely exception (incidentally, I’m not sure if such rendering can be parallelised or not). It’s easily enough to run full desktop environment stuff. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. Screen latency is certainly the key to the whole puzzle.