Research and development efforts have been concentrated on !/W (bang per watt) for two reasons, the other one being cooling and power supply (battery consumption) on mobile devices in particular and the other reason is being able to run at higher clocks for longer before thermal throttling kicks in.
Power consumption and thermal output are relevant for all kinds of modern computers from smartphones to servers to supercomputers. Power consumption and thermal output are related in an almost linear proportionality, twice the power consumption, twice the thermal output.
Since clock frequencies stopped going up some ten years ago, we've had a 5x to 10x increase in single core performance (in addition to multi cores) thanks to increase in power and thermal efficiency and smaller transistors. Concentrating on power consumption keeps Moore's law alive rather than kills it.
But smaller size -> larger leakage current -> higher baseline power consumption.
For several years we have been at the point where the curves cross and power consumption is minimal. The strategy going forward is to turn off parts of the chip when they are not in use, or to reallocate functional units to other tasks (a la Hyperthreading).