The newer processor requirement is a joke. The only real important aspect is the number of cores. I'd take a octacore or hexacore of an older generation over a quad or dual core of a newer generation based on my experience.
Microsoft seems to be exponentially adding services doing random stuff lately though. Moore's law is no longer halving transistor size and doubling speed. Noe the new rule is software halving performance by doubling background tasks. So you have to double cores every few years.
It's a gigantic waste as most of us are not doing computational tasks often to require it. The heavy amount of power saving in chip design shows you that as long as it's not eating too much electricity though, they do not care. The chipmakers justify their lack of advance in clock speeds by adding cores that the software then justifies. Of course there are cool things we can do with parallel programming and all those cores, but its pretty niche. Well like brute forcing for one
