For the record, my Performa 6116CD which shipped with 7.5 had a 60 MHZ PPC 601 and 8 MB RAM. It could run on significantly less than that as well - in fact I believe it ran as far back as on some 80s machines.

Not to mention the classic MacOS of that era had considerable amounts of code still written in 68k assembly, so a lot of what you're seeing is actually being emulated as 68k -> PPC -> ARM.

Processing power is not only frequency and memory. Different instruction sets might show drastically different performance. Processor cache might be higher on old computer (or might not, of course). Memory bandwidth or latency might differ too. I remember reading comparison between 1990 mainframe and current intel server. Mainframe has much higher memory bandwidth and performed much faster on tasks where processor cache was insufficient.

It's emulating a Mac Plus.

> A5 processor that is tuned for battery life, at the cost of performance

It probably also has quite severe temperature scaling.