Back in the early 90s, it was an actual scandal that the Pentium had such a huge heat sink. The magazines (at that time, computing magazines were quite popular) were joking that next they'd put a fan on the CPU. Haha.
Those were the days, really, because there was still the possibility that in the future you'd have any damned thing in your computer, not necessarily an x86. You could have an Alpha or a SPARC or PPC or maybe an i960. And it would be silent and use no power and you'd install it in your bitchin' conversion van.