Will have to read up on this X-gene stuff. I said microarchitecture because ARMv8 is incremental over ARMv7 and not a from the ground up design, but you're rig

Will have to read up on this X-gene stuff. I said microarchitecture because ARMv8 is incremental over ARMv7 and not a from the ground up design, but you're right its an architecture. I think the terms are used interchangeably. Implementing 64 bit is a big leap but since its also backwards compatible, it carries improved/specialized ARMv7 components and instruction set (and X-gene and other custom cores per manufacture/microarchiture).