Optimizing LLVM for AArch64 has in the past mostly concentrated on big cores which prioritized performance over efficiency. As the market has become more interested in smaller AArch64 cores outside of mobile phones, we have been putting effort into optimizing LLVM for these more constrained cores, which flirt with the embedded space. In this talk we discuss why LLVM has left performance off the table for these smaller cores, and we will give some examples of how we improved this. We will also touch on how benchmarking for these cores differs from benchmarking the bigger AArch64 cores.