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

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.

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.

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