>> would you please run the nbench benchmark on your Efika MX with
>> hardfloat enabled, so the comparison becomes more fair?

> please don't hate me for not bothering with this. I don't have the
> systems at hand

Pity. But I can live with that I guess ;-)

>>> Today's fastest ARM CPU's kicks any old PPC based desktop/laptop's butt

>> Today's fastest ARM CPUs are still slower than the PPC970 CPUs in
>> most (i.e. 2.0+ GHz) G5 desktop machines.

> it happened quite some time ago if you consider the *entire* meaning
> of my sentence that you quoted: "Today's fastest ARM CPU's kicks any
> old PPC based desktop/laptop's butt, especially so when you add the
> price tag to the equation" ;-))

Appending "especially when..." to a statement means the statement is true also without the appendix, and *even more so* with the appendix. Your statement however is false without the appendix, so what you probably meant to say (I can't be sure though) is "as long as" instead of "especially when".

> far from every chip manufacturer settles with just the bare core
> reference design provided by ARM

Yes, and we can even quantify it exactly: regarding ARMv7, there're exactly 3 companies that do their own core(s) from scratch instead just licensing them from ARM Ltd. These are Marvell (Sheeva PJ4/PJ4B), Qualcomm (Scorpion, Krait) and Apple (A6 core).
Btw, I don't think "reference design" is an apt term for what is happening here. It's not like ARM ISA licensees take a core design from ARM Ltd. and try to enhance it or adapt it for their needs. In fact, they develop their own microarchitecture from scratch with the ARM ISA as specification which the microarchitecture is an implementation of. This is in contrast to the ARM core licensees who take and use cores from ARM Ltd. as is.