I am really baffled that Intel stopped Atom development, seemingly right about the time they got serious about their modem. Which, maybe they haven't really stopped it, they just aren't doing their own commercial development of it, waiting for their modem to develop to where it can be paired. Which that might also be partly behind their GPU push now as well (where Intel has been seeing that GPU is necessary moving forward, and being able to integrate their own will benefit them, and they can scale it up, which is actually I think a big reason for Nvidia's success, they basically went and looked at the basic level they need for good mobile GPU, then scaled it up, so they're chips across the board reap the efficiency and density benefits).
Plus, with Apple ditching Imagination, it might've been ripe for a buy. Quad core Atom, with integrated Intel modem, and PowerVR GPU might have been interesting. Still have a hunch it would be a hard sell for companies. But it might've helped hold Microsoft off of pushing for ARM on Windows.
How hard would it be to make a CPU that was a hybrid (meaning it could do both ARM and x86, and by that I mean individual core, not having a block of x86 and block of ARM)? The thought being that there should be a fair amount of shared pieces, and so if it could handle code from both, so the pieces for pushing for performance could benefit both (versus having a block of x86 and high performance ARM cores), you could put more towards pushing performance. I kinda wonder if that wasn't what AMD was trying to do with K12 and Zen. Even if it was a situation where each core had to be fully switched, but you could adjust as desired might have been significant (so say for a 4 core, you could have 4 ARM or 4 x86, or a mix, like 2 per at the same time, so it wouldn't be like you'd simultaneously do 4 x86 and 4 ARM, but if they got it working almost like multi-threading that would be even better).