Product Hopes for new Rockchip series

[Vasant]

Yep, large caches are expensive. So most chip vendors are focused on building chips that have small caches but still look good on useless benchmarks.
This is particularly true of ARM vendors who are in  a very competitive market. But if you run something  like a browser on these chips it runs very sluggish because the cache is continuously being trashed. I won't be surprised if the RK3399 benchmarks better than a low end Intel Celeron (4MB cache). However the Celeron will beat most ARM chips in real world usage. It is no surprise that most low end Chromebook still  use Celeron.

From a software perspective ARM presents an interesting challenge for Linux desktop software. Because of the limited software user has  to do many task  in the browser. Android on the other hand has a lot of native applications which unlike a browser based app can run very efficiently even on a low end ARM.

[dsimic]

That is exactly where the release of Apple M1 should come into effect: people can now see what a properly engineered and, consequently, properly priced ARM SoC can do.  This should provide enough headroom for more than a few other manufacturers to make new, high-performance ARM SoCs.