Comment by adrian_b
For cores included in FPGAs, sadly there are none better than Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A72, because there have been no significant upgrades to the families of bigger FPGAs for many years. However in that case you buy the chip mainly for the FPGA and you have to be content with whatever CPU core happens to be included.
On the other hand, for the CPUs intended for cheap embedded computers there are a very large number of companies that offer products with Cortex-A55, or with Cortex-A76 or Cortex-A78, so there is no reason to accept anything older than that.
Texas Instruments is not really representative for embedded microcontrollers or computers, because everything that it offers is based on exceedingly obsolete cores.
Even if we ignore the Chinese companies, which usually have more up-to-date products, there are other companies, like Renesas and NXP, or for smaller microcontrollers Infineon and ST, all of which offer much less ancient chips than TI.
Unfortunately, the US-based companies that are active in the embedded ARM-based computer segment have clearly the most obsolete lines of products, with the exception of NVIDIA and Qualcomm, which however target only the higher end of the automotive and embedded markets, by having expensive products. If you want something made or at least designed in USA, embedded computers with Intel Atom CPUs are likely to be a better choice than something with an archaic ARM core.
For the Intel Atom cores, Gracemont has similar performance to Cortex-A78, Tremont to Cortex-A76 and Goldmont Plus to Cortex-A75; moreover, unlike the CPUs based on Cortex-A78, which are either scarce or expensive (like Qualcomm QCM6490 or NVIDIA Orin), the CPUs based on Gracemont, i.e. Amston Lake (Atom x7000 series) or Twin Lake (N?50 series), are both cheap and ubiquitous.
The latest Cortex-A7xx cores that implement the Armv9-A ISA are better than any Intel Atom core, but for now they are available only in smartphones from 2022 or more recent or in some servers, not in embedded computers (with the exception of a product with Cortex-A720 offered by some obscure Chinese company).