Also notably there are some low power options too. My first kube cluster was on these nice 2014 Acer Chromebox cxi's; they idled at 6w! Crazy slow 2957u Celeron processor, but I used it a node as my desktop for ~2 years (with 16GB ram). But it had gobs of USB bandwidth, mpcie wifi, sata, gigabit, and if i'd sprung for i3 models it probably would have been downright pleasant to use versus the 1.6GHz no turbo dual core I was getting.
Personally I've avoided the atom cores generally, but there's been a variety of decent low power offerings of big cores for a while. Heck, my Ultrabook tablet is ~6W when running, with screen on, with a i5-7200u. 15W TDP core with some additional TDP up available.
Point is, there's been a range of pretty low power x86 offerings. Just, not always super obvious.