> The limit of TDP led directly to the era of "dark silicon," whereby processors would slow on the clock rate and turn off idle cores to prevent overheating.

We used to do this in the 1990s with PHS cell phones in Japan: you certainly didn't need to listen to the microphone until a call was actually connected, and even then the caller might listen and not talk, so after connection you'd listen to the microphone but still not start up the voice compression chips until the noise got above a threshold (so a bit of the moshi moshi would get cut off -- no big deal).