You have a power envelope and area on a wafer, and you can then pretty much divide that up for whats important to you. Qualcomm could make a SoC that outperform

You have a power envelope and area on a wafer, and you can then pretty much divide that up for whats important to you. Qualcomm could make a SoC that outperforms Apple's CPU but then they might not be able to fit their LTE modem, which on Apple phones is a physically separate chip. Qualcomms primary business is in the LTE modem, not making another ARM, so they'd rather fit their chips than more L2 cache or other quick & easy but area and power intensive performance boosts.