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Nice TLDR!

It's apples and oranges comparison to Apple M1 chips (server vs. consumer) but does hint at what's possible with the next generation ARM Cortex "X2" cores, that could appear in next year's flagship smartphones and laptops. A 30-40% IPC jump, partly due to moving to 5nm fabrication process, is huge.

Given the right implementation, namely squeezing more big cores than the current 1-3-4 configuration, it could close the gap considerably with Apple.

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Process node changes generally doesn't do anything for IPC - those are generally rather due to microarchitecture improvements, so I doubt the move to 5nm has anything to do with the IPC gain..?

The node shrink lets you afford more transistors that provide more IPC.

I agree with that - but if you take an unchanged core and manufacture it at a different node, then you won't see a change in IPC, which in my book makes it questionable to attribute IPC gains to the process node.

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