I can't come up with a single other example where cutting power was prioritized.
Things have tended to go the other way with die shrinks that favor performance and often with ridiculous amounts of overclocking piled on top of that.
>Brian and I have long been hinting at the sort of ridiculous frequency/voltage combinations mobile SoC vendors have been shipping at for nothing more than marketing purposes. I remember ARM telling me the ideal target for a Cortex A15 core in a smartphone was 1.2GHz. Samsung’s Exynos 5410 stuck four Cortex A15s in a phone with a max clock of 1.6GHz. The 5420 increases that to 1.7GHz. The problem with frequency scaling alone is that it typically comes at the price of higher voltage. There’s a quadratic relationship between voltage and power consumption, so it’s quite possibly one of the worst ways to get more performance.
This has been a thing with RF Chip design for the 30 years I've been paying attention. Transceiver I used 20 years ago consumed 220 mW in receive mode. One I used 10 years ago, 50 mW. Current one uses 10mW.