[saati]

The v7->v8 jump was the biggest one in the history of ARM, it's totally redesigned, they only kept the name.

[mumblemumble]

Well, that and the ability to run v7 code if you switch it into aarch32 mode.

So one could be forgiven, I should think, for thinking the shift was more comparable to x86 -> amd64 than it was to x86 -> ia64.