[VLM]

No its not directly comparable at all.

The softcore is pretty small, takes up roughly a tenth of a small cheap (by fpga standards) dev board. There are bigger, and smaller, soft cores.

To compare, you could be running benchmarks on about ten simultaneous systems vs one FPGA if you insist on "one chip" vs "one chip" comparisons so obviously the fpga is ten times faster than it appears. The advantage a FPGA provides is really smart custom peripherals. So if for whatever reason you need to do lots of floating point divides in your app, or perhaps in your benchmark, you stick 100 hardware FP dividers on the chip and suddenly your division benchmark absolutely smokes the ARM which I believe has only one hardware FP division unit (or was it two?)