Intel Core i5 8400 vs. i5 9400F Meltdown/Spectre/L1TF/MDS Mitigation Impact
The web browser performance is also similarly still affected even with the initial hardware mitigations present for the Core i5 9400F.
Going into this I was expecting to see the Core i5 9400F possibly having a bit smaller delta in the performance as a result of the Meltdown hardware mitigations and the start of other architectural improvements, but at least in these affected workloads the hit was similar to that of the Core i5 8400.
If taking a look at the geometric mean across the dozens of benchmarks carried out, both the Core i5 8400 and i5 9400F basically have around 18% lower performance from these default/out-of-the-box mitigations on Linux systems for Meltdown, Spectre, L1TF/Foreshadow, and MDS/Zombieload. Those wanting to dig more into these numbers and some additional data points can do so via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.
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