[wilun]

Yes but Apple has an edge compared to other ARM (and that's what we've been discussing about in the first place) and comparing the CPU speed of an energy optimized phone SoC to an high end desktop core is absolutely not representative of what you can expect from a team tasked with creating a CPU core dedicated to performance in the first place, with less power constraints. (And that's also why the work Apple has already done on their own CPU is so impressive, btw.)

Otherwise I could as well take the perf of an IBM z14 mainframe and compare it to an existing smartphone SoC, and declare that Arm is doomed because too slow. Note than even increasing the clock alone of those ARM cores would increase the perf greatly -- it might not be possible without modifying them in various degree right now (if you don't target high freq to begin with, you can afford to work less on the length of some critical data path), but given today processes it is very probably not extremely hard to tune the design if needed.