It's not Arm's system it's Ampere's. Arm is claiming nothing about this cpu.

kllrnohj · on Dec 19, 2020

This system uses ARM's Neoverse-N1 CPU cores. Ampere put it in a socket, but it's still "ARM's" CPU core. This isn't a custom design like Apple's CPUs.

And per the article it sounds like it's ARM's fault this can't exceed 3.3 ghz. That seems to be a Neoverse-N1 limitation:

"Fundamentally, the Altra’s handling of frequency and power in such a manner is simply a by-product of the Neoverse-N1 cores not being able to clock in higher than 3.3GHz"

klelatti · on Dec 19, 2020

System != Core for a whole range of reasons as you know - not least price. I actually think that Ampere should get the credit for producing a system this competitive (even with an off the shelf core).