Right. It seems paradoxical to save money by spending money on new machines. Versus low hanging fruit like turning off or sleeping unused nodes or taking a hard look at your computing footprint and downsizing.
Whether it is a net win for energy consumption entirely what you're using it for and how the entire power profile of the system looks, not just the CPU and not just at full power.
If it uses as much or more power when busy and you're just using it to push more frames in a video game, you're probably not going to singlehandedly bring about the next ice age. Same if the low utilization system power is similar and you spend most of the time messing around on the internet or editing code occasionally punctuated by a compile job, even if that does run faster.
