It does pretty much the same thing as what the existing hived node does. Right now the focus was on it existing not performing better. In regards to raspberri pi or phone, (aka ARM build) I think there was some work that was done by @gtg but I don't know how far he went.
RE: Hive is now a multi client network, the forking incident I caused, and reducing my proposal to 150 HBD a day