Don't you think that 2-big cores for A14 is obsolete on 5nm? Also to keep up with new ARM Cortex X1 cores (2xX1+2xA78 big cores) Apple needs to bring 4-big cores soon or later for iPhone. 5nm node offer pretty good opportunity in terms of transistor headroom.
Why?
Apple is sparing with it's halo performance cores for a reason - they suck the battery dry when in full swing - this is the second edge to the blade of any super wide design, which is probably why they put such effort into the perf/watt development of their little cores which are still leaving ARM Cortex in the dust on that front due to zero consumer updates since A55.
Bare in mind that even with A77 Qualcomm have moved to having one 'prime' core at full whack frequency, with others at a few hundred mhz less and then the little cores.
If the SD 875 uses X1 at all, it will likely be that single prime core, with the other 3 being A78 - power consumption alone will demand this configuration, though perhaps an 8cx successor might use 2x X1 cores or more.
I really do hope that ARM put their best foot forward with the next gen little core to match with Matterhorn - considering that the more efficient background app execution mode of any mobile device depends on them, to say nothing of all the lesser gadgets like streaming sticks that use only little cores for their basic computation.
It should also be noted that core transistor count will likely not stay the same from generation to generation within a given width, this means that while perf will go up, so will power and area for each generation.
The few examples where this is not true like A73 and A78 have been for differing reasons - A73 was not a direct uArch successor to A72 coming from the Sophia design hub, quite possibly more of a descendant of the A17 at a more fundamental level, and A78 was likely Austin recognising areas where they could have made A77 more efficient, given more time to work on it.
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