You must be doing some task that I've never used my servers for if you consider a dedicated Atom somehow vastly inferior to a virtualized "real CPU". My servers are never CPU bound. They are disk, memory, and I/O bound, in that order. I couldn't possibly overwork the CPU on any machine I have...web service is simply not a CPU-intensive task.
Besides that, Atom CPUs are quite fast for many kinds of tasks...sometimes faster than a virtualized "real CPU" for server workloads, like serving websites, databases, and email. My servers at Amazon often have "sluggish" periods throughout the day, despite them being quite low-load systems; it seems to be because the other servers on the same CPU are working harder. Shared resources can be a curse, though I usually don't mind.
People use servers for things other than hosting websites, and I've seen my fair share of web services that do push the CPU for significant amounts of time.
But sure, for 99% of all websites, CPU is not the issue.
Besides that, Atom CPUs are quite fast for many kinds of tasks...sometimes faster than a virtualized "real CPU" for server workloads, like serving websites, databases, and email. My servers at Amazon often have "sluggish" periods throughout the day, despite them being quite low-load systems; it seems to be because the other servers on the same CPU are working harder. Shared resources can be a curse, though I usually don't mind.