I don't think there is much lagging in the node size with the A9 family in comparison to Intel's mobile chips. A9 is a 14-16 nm FinFET design. Not much different than Intel's 14 nm FinFET for core-M. The A9X is clocked at 2.26 GHz compared with a Skylake core-m7 clocked at 1.2-3.1 GHz.