Atom isn't crippled so much as it's developed from a very simple (small, low-power, in-order execution) baseline and so hasn't had the time to reach the level o

Atom isn't crippled so much as it's developed from a very simple (small, low-power, in-order execution) baseline and so hasn't had the time to reach the level of performance maturity and sophistication that the "big cores" (Haswell, Skylake, etc) have. If Intel had the ability to get Skylake performance in an Atom power envelope, they would.