Yes, an A10 core is only 60% as fast as a single intel core. But the Intel part has a 91 watt TDP. IMO 60% as fast is not "far away". Clearly if apple wanted

Yes, an A10 core is only 60% as fast as a single intel core. But the Intel part has a 91 watt TDP. IMO 60% as fast is not "far away". Clearly if apple wanted to use more power and/or transistors they could improve the performance further. Apple's so competitive in that space that intel's actually in retreat in the mobile space. Sure Intel is much faster in multicore, but that's because it has much more power to work with. Intel's has tried to scale decent performance to lower power levels, it hasn't worked out particularly well so far. The more interesting question is will Apple have better luck scaling 64-bit arms up than intel has had with scaling down.