Is Sophia-Antipolis so great? The way you (and almost everyone else) speaks makes them look legendary.
They designed Cortex A9, A12/A17, A73 and A75 - all very efficient and performant cores.
By comparison the Austin design team have a tendency to go big and sometimes over do it a bit pushing performance leading to cores that are not so great efficiency wise in their first node target.
I wouldn't call the Sophia-Antipolis design team great, but what they managed with more constrained compute resources on A75 was pretty impressive.
Supposedly the A720/Hunter and X4/Hunter-ELP cores are ground up designs with a greater performance target in mind since shortly after the SoftBank acquisition when they started having greater R&D capital for designing several larger cores in parallel to become competitive with the higher end (aka Apple).
Whether the SA team can meet that target is certainly an interesting question.
From what I was told a couple of years ago the A710/X2 generation codenamed Matterhorn was supposd to be this new SA ground up design.
Instead we got a further evolution of Austin's A76 continuity (A76 was their last truly ground up design) - and A715/X3 is another Austin evolution.
At this point I have to admit I'm well past anxious that something has gone horribly wrong forcing a complete restart.