Even if you can't power every transistor simultaneously, shrinking allows you to layer on a whole bunch of specialized logic blocks. They're dark almost all the

Even if you can't power every transistor simultaneously, shrinking allows you to layer on a whole bunch of specialized logic blocks. They're dark almost all the time, and when they're lit up they're displacing much more energy intensive general purpose computation. Things like hashing/encryption functions, hardware encoders and decoders, even full blown FPGAs are all candidates. You can also make more, slower cores, running at lower voltage, if you've got any embarrassingly parallel problems to work on. It's not as attractive as just getting faster and more energy efficient across the board like we have been doing, but there's still room to move there.