It's baffling because top end x86 CPUs consume significantly more power and run at significantly higher clock speeds. If these benchmarks are actually valid it suggests that we might see ARM ousting x86 on the desktop too sooner rather than later, which would be massive considering PCs have been x86 based for about 4 decades.
Remember though that performance doesnt scale linearly with power though - a 15W laptop CPU is only something like 30% slower in single threaded performance than a 95W desktop CPU (which is what the discussed benchmark is measuring).
ARM is pretty unlikely to oust x86 in Windows PCs any time soon. Even if Intel continues to struggle to catch up to TSMC's fab advantage, AMD is making pretty compelling CPUs using the same fabrication node as Apple. And really, Windows is stuck with x86 largely for compatibility reasons - emulation would be both a performance and power drag. If ARM is destined to defeat x86, its probably going to have to win in the datacenter first, depriving Intel (and possibly AMD, soon) of their highest margin sector.
With a higher power target I don't see why this architecture couldn't have more cores (but I also have no idea what I'm talking about) - looks like it currently has 2 "big" cores and 4 "small" cores.
