Current a15 is still in 5nm but outperforms latest snapdragon that’s on 4nm - those fastest android arm chips matching iPhone chips from 2 generations behind last time when checked Geekbench

The part where Apple can (or is courageous enough) to plop large caches and other otherwise "trivial but expensive" performance enhancements is the critical point. The vertical integration also means that they get to design the parameters of the planned device instead of how Qualcomm or Samsung end up making compromises for market share

Difficult to get information, seems like the A15 has 2x 3.2 ghz cores whereas the S8G2 has 1x 3.2 hgz core. Searched a little bit on Google but could not come up with detailed - only fragmented - information on L1/L2/L3 caches for the A15 and S2G2.

But I thought we were talking Server/Desktop chips, not phone chips (I have no clue about them, my MI11Ultra seems fast enough for everything, I'm not compiling on it).

And the M2 has massive caches (L1/L2/L3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2

How much performance you get with caches are shown with the X3D models that - gaming performance - are faster than all than more expensive Intel/AMD chips.

            M2 Max   Ryzen 7900     
     Cores  12       12
     L1     320kb    64kb
     L2     32MB     12MB
     Last   48MB     64MB (32MB/chiplet)