I’m not sure if that’s true.

The current lowest speced Mac can absolutely dominate my previous 2012 2x20c ivy bridge era Xeon tower. And on top of that, the power and heat are drastically less with the new machine.

The only reason a system of this era even kept up is the years Intel just didn’t do anything that was that much better and because of ram and pci express expansion which allowed for upgraded faster storage and faster gpus.

These days I can get better performance in a system that I can hold in my palm (Apple m4, amd ryzen ai 9) that doesn’t produce enough heat to keep my entire room toasty in the winter.