Yes, but we tend to focus on passive cooling rather than active cooling - your comment was all about active cooling and the extra costs thereof, and passive coo

Yes, but we tend to focus on passive cooling rather than active cooling - your comment was all about active cooling and the extra costs thereof, and passive cooling techniques do not imply an extra power cost. But yes - modern lower power hardware (Apple Silicon, lower power AMD Zen, etc) can be drastically faster than older hardware, at significantly lower power - and massively lower total power consumption for work done. You can get wins here by making sure even modern hardware is running in the more power efficient part it's perf/watt curve - for example, ECO mode on modern AMD hardware (105W+ to 65W, for instance), reducing the board power limit on GPUs when doing compute (~420W to 225W, for most efficient on my 3090!), etc. You lose remarkably little performance by doing so.