I think a lot of people were (a) fuelled by a desire to complain about Apple as much as possible and (b) were assuming that ARMv8 was an AMD64-type transition or even a SPARC64-type transition, rather than a totally new ISA.
That said, from Anandtech's article, it looks like most of the speed boost is from microarchitectural improvements, rather than use of the new ISA; ARMv7 code shows most of the speedup.
That said, from Anandtech's article, it looks like most of the speed boost is from microarchitectural improvements, rather than use of the new ISA; ARMv7 code shows most of the speedup.