AM1 was a competitor to Intel's Atom chips. Which have no socket at all!
AM1 was very niche, but a socket for ~20W CPUs is outstanding. You can pair any AM1 motherboard (down to $20 crap) with any AM1 CPU ($20 crap to $100 less crap). Good for HTPCs and NAS machines... when you need a "serious" Raspberry Pi ish machine with x86 compatibility, AM1 was my choice.
I agree. Those were nice cpus and it is not a bad thing that they had a socket. I did not list them as a negative point, but to show that AMD had more sockets in the last time than AM3+, which could maybe partly explain OPs misconception that AMD spread their cpus over them more than Intel. When FM2+ got upgrades while AM3+ got them as well, it was indeed a strange split. That is was nothing compared what Intel does with their platform segmentation seems to have got lost.
AM1 was very niche, but a socket for ~20W CPUs is outstanding. You can pair any AM1 motherboard (down to $20 crap) with any AM1 CPU ($20 crap to $100 less crap). Good for HTPCs and NAS machines... when you need a "serious" Raspberry Pi ish machine with x86 compatibility, AM1 was my choice.