Apple's A-series chips aren't small, though. The A10 (14nm) was 125 mm2, about the same size as the mobile quad core Intel 14nm parts.

True, the Apple A-series chips are large, but the A10 was built on TSMC's 16nm process, not 14nm. Even TSMC's 10nm process (used for the A11) is barely smaller than Intel's 14nm, these numbers contain a lot of marketing as you surely know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_nanometer#Comparison_of_pro... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nanometer#10_nm_process_nod...

The A11 is only 88mm², with 8MB of cache, compared to the Skylake quad-core i7 CPUs with 122mm² and the same amount of cache (using Intel's 14nm process).

The Snapdragon 820 (Samsung 14nm process) also clocked in at 144mm² with only 1.5 MB of cache. Apple's chips aren't the only large ARM chips.