Of course, Apple "designs" the exact same Cortex-A9 and PowerVR cores as everyone else. (I'll give them some credit if they are first with A15.) Qualcomm is arguably more innovative given that Krait, Adreno, and the baseband are all in-house.

Remember that it's another ARM based SOC; as a percentage of gates it would surprise me if Apple's input was more than a percent.

I also suspect that most of the speed and power gains come from process improvements.

I'm sorry you are so brainwashed by Apple marketing. Apple's Ax line is using reference ARM designs, with negligible modifications.