Intel Corp (INTC)

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Intel needs to have two parallel Atom teams like they do with Core (Haifa/Hillsboro), and they need to basically do significant improvements each year. They only have one Atom core team (Austin), so that's why you only see significant uArch improvements/overhauls every two generations.

But even then, Intel's process execution stumbles coupled with its serious issues in SoC integration timelines makes the Atom core efforts look worse than they are (in 2017 we should have been gearing up for the Goldmont overhaul, for example).

Atom could have been great, especially since their engineers don't need to waste time trying to implement/validate all of those ISA extensions like AVX/AVX2/AVX512 like the Core teams do. Atom could have eventually brought Core-class performance in legacy workloads in a much lower power/area footprint, making it ideal for phones, tablets, dense servers, and maybe even Ultrabooks (leaving the "big" Core for Xeon servers, desktop PCs, and high performance notebooks).

But, that's just not how it all worked out.