[ikono]

I can see what you mean to some extent. The top of the line server parts are still Sandy Bridge-E. By the time Ivy-Bridge-E is out Haswell will be available on the traditional PC side.

I would actually make a different argument though. As time goes on the absolute cost of the CPU is not that important. For big data centers lowering costs is about efficiency more than cheaper hardware. So in my mind a lot of what Intel is trying to do on the Mobile side, both laptop and smartphone/tablet, will help them in the data center. If Intel can drive down both peak and idle power consumption while maintaining or even improving both single threaded and multi threaded performance, there's potential to really lower the power needed to run a data center and in turn create a lot of value.

The real question is what's the next big thing going to be? Eventually the current CPU model will give out to something else. Maybe that's something like Psi or Tesla or maybe something completely different.