Watch out for what comes out of ARM Austin. Their last core was the A72 from a couple of years ago. Rumour has it they've been working on a big core to better compete with Apple and Samsung.
Looking back, it makes sense that Qualcomm discarded their underperforming custom design efforts (at least for the mobile market). If ARM can deliver a competitive design, why not fully commit to their roadmap and save significant amounts on R&D costs?
Apple were one of the last of the major companies to come out with a statement regarding Meltdown and Spectre. The BBC articles for Intel and the rest were written a day or so earlier.
I think the A7 being the first 6-wide core in the mobile space was far more important than the fact it was 64 bit. That gave it unprecedented single threaded performance and competitors are struggling to keep pace on that front to this day, despite them also being 64 bit for several generations now.
I agree with others, with curl and the likes you will hit insurmountable roadblocks sooner or later. It's better to go full headless browser from the start.
I use a python->selenium->chrome stack. The Page Object Model [0] has been a revelation for me. My scripts went from being a mess of spaghetti code to something that's a pleasure to write and maintain.