Does Apple have a boost mode for running benchmarks as Samsung does with the S4?
The A7 chip is a nice improvement over the A6 but some of the people saying that it's in the same league as the Intel i series chip or even BayTrail in CPU power is pretty delusional. The tests that Apple does well in are as much software tests as they are hardware tests. They are browser based tests where the scores are influenced by how fast the javascript engine is. While these tests are valid for comparing absolute CPU performance on the same platform and same browser it's not valid when comparing results from a different platform and different browser. While you can definitively say that the A7 chip is faster then the A6 chip (because we have results from the same platform and browser) you can't necessarily say it's faster then BT-T or S800.
If we look at the browser based benchmarks (sunspider, octane, kraken, etc) we know that the Apple platform does very well and beats even BT-T. Android is severely handicapped in theses tests because they don't run native code but rely on DVM and the browsers are different. Tests have shown that on the SAME hardware depending on what browser or OS you are using the results can differ by over 300%. Even Anand's review of iOS 7 compared to iOS6 says this:
Theres a 15 percent difference in sunspider and browsermark, and a larger one closer to 50 percent in kraken and google octane, webxprt sees a 30 percent jump.
This is not to say that the A7 isn't a good chip because it looks like it was designed very well for what it was intended to do, it just means that we would never know if an S800 or BT-T would perform even better if Apple used those CPU for the iPhone 5s. You just can't make any conclusion about hardware when the software affects the result so much.
Now to explain the Linpack score, Eug explained part of it. The Java engine efficiency plays a huge part in the score that's one of the reasons why Apple does very well. If you remember in the Froyo days on Android Linpack scores jumped hugely on Android devices when JIT was added to Dalvik. The other reason why the A7 chip does really well in Linpack is because it's a floating point test and the A7 chip has 128bit FP compared to 64bit on the A6 and android phones. Without any other optimizations that would put the A7 around a score of 1150 compared to the A6's 584. Given that Apple has said the A7 is about 30% faster then the A6 (IPC) + 128bit FPU the Linpack score would be around 1600 like what the results show.