They are just using off the shelf fab space. OTOH, they do a fine job of building a custom core for a specific purpose. That means they can tune and remove func

They are just using off the shelf fab space. OTOH, they do a fine job of building a custom core for a specific purpose. That means they can tune and remove functionality they don't need for their particular application set. As someone else mentioned in this thread apparently they don't implement EL2 which is the virtualization layer on armv8. Yet their die sizes a huge and they are targeting a pretty narrow frequency range. So It doesn't really take much to eak out a few 10's of percent here/there to create a product that looks better than a generic core from ARM + a generic OS tuned more for servers (linux) with a JIT'ed GUI. I've seen cases where just pulling compiler flags on an application yield a larger difference than what is seen between top end android and apple phones.