> There is no "magic" at play here, it's just lots and lots of raw muscle. They just seem to have a freakishly successful strategy for choosing what aspects of the processor to throw that muscle at.

There is no freakishly successful strategy at play there as well. It's just all previous attempts at "fast ARM" chip were rather half hearted "add a pipeline step there, add extra register there, increase datapath width there," and not to squeeze it to the limit.