An analogy with airplanes: you pay cubic dollars to fly faster at the high end. That is, it's easy to build an airplane that flies at 90 knots. You can then cl

An analogy with airplanes: you pay cubic dollars to fly faster at the high end. That is, it's easy to build an airplane that flies at 90 knots. You can then clean up the aerodynamics a bit, burn a bit more fuel to get a bit more power to fly 110 knots. If you want to fly 130 knots, you probably need to add fairings and wheel pants and put in a bigger engine that burns even more fuel. It's very hard to get to 150 knots without retractable landing gear, a massive engine, or removing seats. To get to 200 knots you need 50% more cylinders or a turbocharger. To go past that you usually start looking at a turboprop at 10x the cost and 4x the fuel burn, then jets (...etc.) Back to computers... doubling your power consumption and heat output for a 100% speed improvement is a perfect, linear improvement. If you need more performance, it's a fair trade. Even if you care about battery life, you should still make the trade, because drawing half as much power for twice as long still burns the same amount of total energy, so you don't gain anything by slowing down. But would you double your power consumption and heat output for a 50% speed improvement? What about a 20% improvement? It's the same idea. If the chip makers are setting voltages near the high-end, exponential cost, diminishing returns side of the curve, then you'll get more total "value" back by going back to the linear part of the curve, assuming you care about all of the variables, and not just "more speed at any cost."