Well for one I dont see any price advantage of ARM compared to Intel. ( In this area ) 8 Core Atoms are Cheap enough. The Atom you are referring to are First Gen Netbook Atoms. Which are indeed very bad without any serious software optimization. The Atom i am referring to is the newest Avoton C2750. Which will soon be available in the OVH new brand SYS range.
Assuming every thing else stays the same, Memory, SSD/HDD, Network etc, the cost difference between a Atom Server and a ARM server are in the range of early double digit figure. And there isn't a $5 ARM broad. The ARM SoC provided by Marvell Amanda would have been double of that already. So the cost difference for a rented dedicated server between ARM and Intel Atom would be at most a few dollars difference per month. Not to mention Atom is still a lot of more powerful. Website usage have spikes, no one wants a server that could barely handle the load it is getting at today.
ARM has the advantage in Smartphone and Tablet where there are no software compatibility concern, and it is working at 100s mW range. In Servers these two advantage disappeared.
Yes, that makes sense. And first gen; the current ones for sale in shops are still the first gen? The laptops I see brand new in shops, and they are not netbooks, are unusable to me. Whatever you do beyond opening 1 single window breaks it completely (under Windows anyway). Maybe those are older, I don't know, but I think they are not first gen?
I hope that'll change as you say because I love the price ;)
As far as I know, (@everyone, Do correct me if i am wrong ) most of those are stocks left overs or 1st gen design with smaller node. Which basically means they still sucks. And without an SSD ( I/O bottleneck ) those laptop will suck even more. Since the PC industry has absolutely zero care on user experience they dont want to put a costly SSD into a Atom Notebook.
And Why would anyone want one when a Celeron or Pentium is only $20 bucks more expensive but perform a lot faster still?
ARM has the advantage in Smartphone and Tablet where there are no software compatibility concern, and it is working at 100s mW range. In Servers these two advantage disappeared.