"Argh. It's Jeff Liebermann. Spell my name correctly or I shall call upon the gods for divine retaliation. "

So you're the pagan sorcerer responsible for my internet outage of a few hours today.

"Most of my Chromebooks do not have a fan. Heat is conducted from the CPU to either a metal case or the metal..."

Something that is not plastic ? Isn't there some law against that ?

"For every decrease in CPU power consumption, there is
an equal and opposite increase in clock speeds."

I stopped all attempts at overclocking in the Pentium 2 days, but I grasp the concept. However, from what I have gleaned the processor speed is not the end of the world usually. In a PC for example the RAM is slower, the HD slower than that, and so on until we get to the speed of access to data sources, i.e. the internet. So conceivably couldn't they just not crank the clock to the max and save power and generate less heat ? Or do they already do that ? My laptops have a setting, performance, balanced and battery life. Is that possibly an indirect "underclocking" control ? If not, what is it ?

"Might be an IGBT FET. Very low Vce(sat) at
high currents. However, it's not zero, so there's still some heat
that needs to removed. "

The current should not be that high, all that current is cumulative right ? Seems like the main issue is charging and discharging the input capacitance. As such,lower clock speeds should be quite effective. If they could get it down to the point where no heatsink is needed at all, wouldn't there be enough advantage in cost to justify a slightly lower clock speed ? A phone accessing the internet for example, how much does that clock speed really mean then ? I am not being sarcastic here, that is a valid question, (I think) how processor intensive is all this ?

Maybe there is advertising value. I could see the yuppies in the cellphone store looking at specs and saying "LOOK, this one has a higher clock speed !".

Or are these the issues that keep the engineers up at night ?