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I wonder if the heat-bound nature of especially mobile CPUs these days could contribute to memory "catching up" to CPU performance. That is, the CPU idle while waiting for memory could be seen as necessary for heat dissipation and so you could consider the CPU at capacity.

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That's basically what I understand the idea of "race to halt" to be. Mobile CPUs are already designed to finish their current task as quickly as possible so they can idle to cool off (that's how laptop chips can support turbo boost).

I think the time it takes for memory reads is too short to take advantage of though, because of how long it takes chips to come out of sleep & ramp up their clock speed.

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