From what I can tell stock ARM cores are and have been smaller than Apple's custom large cores, OTOH Mali has been known to be both large and inefficient compared to both Qualcomm's and Imaginary/Apple's solutions for years. Along with the trend to go slow and wide, I could only think that they'd put more area to the graphics, unless they plan on enlarging even further that useless "NPU" that still doesn't have a proper use case?

We know a lot about the size of ARM and Apple cores. The Weibo tipster is probably just mistaken. Licensed ARM cores are commonly more deliberately optimised for area and power than Apple's cores.

Apple's (big) performance cores tend to offer higher performance than licensed ARM cores and licensed ARM performance cores tend to be both smaller and more power efficient than Apple's performance cores.

Other SoC features, e.g. NPU, can make a difference, however.

Quote from: c3n4i1 on August 02, 2020, 10:28:05
I thought they were banned from using ARM and TSMC?? Please explain. I also thought that the new devices are not allowed to use Android and Google services.
If everything above is true, it will be a worthless device.

Yes, TSMC will be fulfilling orders for another 2 months or so and they've been buying up massive quantities of chips in that time period. Afterwards, we'll probably have to see what they do with SMIC.

So ARM can't compete with Apple anymore.

I thought they were banned from using ARM and TSMC?? Please explain. I also thought that the new devices are not allowed to use Android and Google services.
If everything above is true, it will be a worthless device.