The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. T

The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm. Oh my god yes. If you could actually run an atom server in less than 10 watts for a 4GiB system, even before disk, I'd be renting those out instead of VPSs, and probably killing the competition on it, too. My (perhaps unreasonably cynical) theory is that intel nerfed the desktop atoms because they don't want them to compete with their server chips in my applications. But, on the other hand, that's irrational, because when per-core performance doesn't matter, (and in virtualization, more, smaller cores are better than fewer, faster cores) AMD already beats Intel by quite a lot. And atoms certainly don't compete in applications where per-core performance matters, so yeah, that's probably not it.