> > I'd don't know what changed within ARM application processor
> > group, but recently they have very high success
> > rate: A7, A12, A53, A17 are all pretty good.
>
> Focus on incremental improvement maybe? A8, A9 and A15 were all big jumps with significantly different
> micro-architectures than their predecessors. All of the ones you listed on the other hand have evolved
> from previous cores. They have better branch prediction, tighter coupling of the L1/L2 caches and
> other improvements which do not significantly affect the execution core yet provide very significant
> benefits, and especially so in integer codes. Most of those improvements can also be shared between
> the cores so that might also have helped out in focusing development efforts.

Those small tweaks matter a lot. The difference between nehalem and cortex A15 is mostly in those tweaks. Cortex has wider execution stage, but nehalem is more tweaked and has better memory subsystem and maybe better branch predictor,and fetches more instructions per cycle. By wider core I mean nehalem's 3 compute pipelines vs cortex 6 compute pipelines, and both have same number of loads/stores per cycle. A15 scheduler contains more operations than nehalems.