It's sort of a little bit of both. Like for sure their raw gate count is a huge part, but if you go look at a bunch of their acquisitions (particularly looking at Intrinsity here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity ), they have a lot of really cool techniques for making their designs count even gate for gate. Intrinsity's work is neat, because they didn't really make any uarch changes or increase the gate count really, they just made their Cortex-A8 core way better which lets you judge the work in an apples to apples (lol) way that you normally don't get.