Yes, GLyphy as it is is very heavy on the GPU. I'm sure embedded devices would struggle, but seems like on desktop it's not far from usable. I mean, it gives me a decent framerate on my 2-year old Thinkpad with intel graphics and Linux mesa driver...
That said, after discussions at LGM, I have at least three pages full of ideas for optimizing it. It's just a matter of time.
Also, we already do try to share arcs among cells. Current memory usage is about 2k per glyph for a sans serif font. I think we can get that down to about 1k.
At any rate, feel free to join the Google Group and continue discussion there.