Doing a proper fair comparison of microarchitectures is incredibly difficult. Even measuring the the power consumption of the core alone may be rather tricky. E

Doing a proper fair comparison of microarchitectures is incredibly difficult. Even measuring the the power consumption of the core alone may be rather tricky. Especially if you don't have access to the design details. So when it says 'same system active power' I'm assuming it means measuring the power consumption of the SoC with the Apple core vs the power consumption of the SoC with the A510s in when they're both running software that should stress the little cores and not use the big cores. It could be that the Apple core microarchitecture is genuinely better on perf/watt, it could be the different process nodes the cores were built on. It could be the choices made by the implementation engineers when they were making the chip (you can get huge swings in power consumption, area and timing results just by changing some settings). Apple for instance could have really valued perf/watt and spent lots of time on the implementation side here, where a Qualcomm/Samsung SoC they just slapped it in, cranked up the frequency as hard as they could to get nice headline numbers and sticking in a tight area budget and called it a day (which Arm has no control over). Perhaps some other vital system component (e.g. the DDR controller) has bad power efficiency and a lot of the power is being lost to that. To do an actual comparison you'd need to run a power simulation of the two core RTLs side by side, look at workloads that actually represent what you want to do with the efficiency cores and try to make the systems they're running in as close as possible. Only Apple, being the only company with access to both sets of RTL, could do this and if they have I seriously doubt they're telling anyone about the results.