But it's a start. Besides, if it's NEON optimized, I don't see what's stopping it to being as fast as a good processor, and if the price is cheap then you could stock up on some and mine LTC decently.
The quadcore A9s only gets between 2-4kh/s if I remember right, the NEON miner is energy efficient (~2x more than video cards) because it uses the on-die L2 cache but the chips are so expensive that it's pointless.
Also you might hit that efficiency if you way undervolt GPUs too, I haven't really tried but I wouldn't be surprised.