I don't think this is entirely true. (Although please let me know if I misunderstood your comment or if I'm wrong.) While it is true that CPUs' power usage incr

I don't think this is entirely true. (Although please let me know if I misunderstood your comment or if I'm wrong.) While it is true that CPUs' power usage increased significantly between the 1980s and 2006, I believe you were able to get much better performance "in the same thermal and power envelope" during that time period. There's two conflicting factors that made these energy efficiency gains less apparent in the market: power efficiency and power usage. Roughly until 2006, both Dennard Scaling and Moore's Law held, so you got ~2x performance efficiency (performance per watt/performance in the same thermal and power envelope) every 1.5 years. [1,2] Power consumption also increased at the same time [3], so you got both more performance in the same thermal and power envelope (useful for mobile/embedded chips) and greater power consumption (useful for desktop/server chips). 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Relation_with_Moore's_law_and_computing_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Relation_with_... 2. https://iscaconf.org/isca2018/docs/HennessyPattersonTuringLectureISCA4June2018.pdf https://iscaconf.org/isca2018/docs/HennessyPattersonTuringLe... - slide 25 3. http://www.edwardbosworth.com/My5155_Slides/Chapter01/ThePowerWall.htm http://www.edwardbosworth.com/My5155_Slides/Chapter01/ThePow... - "Here is a Clue to the Problem" graph