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There's perf/watt but also area on the core that's an important factor. Watt and area are often related but not always. Do you know how the A510 cores and Apple's efficiency cores compare on area?

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Apple’s efficiency cores are significantly larger than A5x cores.

Too bad not everyone can afford the die space ;) All the economics etc are different for Apple since they don't sell the chips by themselves, and basically buy all the fab capacity for a new TSMC process.

Exactly, and this is one of the main reasons why Apple is unmatched in performance in the smartphone space: they can afford much larger transistor budget than other companies since they're vertically integrated.

This isn't always true.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has 16B transistors on TSMC N4.

Apple A16 has 16B transistors on TSMC N4.

One of the biggest disappointments of the new A17 was getting a major node jump and only increasing the transistor count by 3B.

Qualcomm’s SoC includes a modem. Apple’s modems aren’t integrated.

Qualcomm x24 was 33mm2 on TSMC N7. The max transistor density of that process is 100M/mm2 giving an upper threshold of 3.3B transistors, but analog circuits scale notoriously bad and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the actual transistor count were 10-20x less than that theoretical upper limit.

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