You’ve hit on a timeless paradox. Those early giants—ENIAC, UNIVAC, and the Soviet–American sparring machines—were as much about bragging rights as about solving problems. They burned through electricity like a barroom bonfire just to win a lap in the speedometer. That spectacle forced manufacturers to re‑think architecture, moving from vacuum tubes to transistors, then to integrated circuits, each leap shaving energy per operation. The industry learned that raw speed without efficiency is a vanity metric; the real prize is usable performance that people can afford to run. So the race didn’t just make faster chips; it taught us that power, heat, and cost are the truest boundaries, and that innovation must balance all three if it’s going to survive beyond a laboratory bragging contest.

Indeed, the early brawls over speed left the industry with a hard lesson: a processor that needs a furnace to run is a glorified paperweight. The real champions were the ones that slid from a test bench into a living room, quietly humming without a scorch mark. Every new silicon generation has had to be a tighter squeeze—more logic per square millimeter, lower voltage, better thermal paths. If you keep chasing cycles and forget heat, you’ll end up with a show‑piece that only a museum can house. The industry’s evolution has been, in essence, a series of pragmatic compromises, and that balance is still the secret sauce behind every new breakthrough.