Not a dumb question at all. You can to an extent, but the returns diminish quickly. It isn't linear. This fact however makes "performance per watt" comparisons

Not a dumb question at all. You can to an extent, but the returns diminish quickly. It isn't linear. This fact however makes "performance per watt" comparisons misleading between different processors designed for different environments (e.g. M1 vs AMD Desktop). It takes a more power to get that much extra perf, conversely and the more under-appreciate part IMO reducing the speed a little can save a ton of power/heat if the chip is currently running at the higher power portion of the curve. On a desktop machine most people would want them to tune for performance at quite a substantial power efficiency cost so of course a desktop chip most probably is less power efficient per unit of compute. You don't need to power it with a battery after all and there's heaps more cooling capacity in a bigger form factor so why optimise for that?