This is a real thing. For game consoles, which run their chips pretty "hot" in order to meet the performance requirements for high-end gaming, the main SOCs have a design lifetime. There are deliberate trade-offs between performance and the expected lifetime of the part. This lifetime is difficult to estimate prior to ship.

One console made a firmware update about a year after its release that increased its clocks by about ten percent. I'm guessing they did this after seeing telemetry numbers indicating that the box's cooling system was doing a better job than expected, and that there was lifetime headroom available (probably other factors were involved, too, but heat is a major one).