In addition to what others have said there’s one area to consider: the “uncore” performance: memory controllers, PCIE busses, core crosslinks, cache coherency e

In addition to what others have said there’s one area to consider: the “uncore” performance: memory controllers, PCIE busses, core crosslinks, cache coherency etc. Both Intel and AMD have demonstrated they can scale these effectively. The A12X isn’t even playing in the same league when it comes to uncore functionality. I’m sure if you created a version of the A12X with the same cache, memory, PCIE, core count, and interconnections the power picture looks a lot different. This is part of the reason why “datacenter arm” CPUs never get much of a foothold: as soon as you start ramping up your uncore transistor count, your power advantage erodes significantly, to the point where Intel and AMD begin to yield better performance-per-watt in typical server workloads due to a tightly optimized microarch and an “uncore” to feed it.