Intel CPU Security Mitigation Costs From Haswell Through Panther Lake
Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 12 March 2026 at 11:50 AM EDT. Page 3 of 8. 16 Comments.
Database and heavy I/O workloads traditionally showed a sharp difference in performance with mitigations=off, but for the most part it was indistinguishable with Panther Lake.
One exception was the RocksDB update random benchmark showing a significant boost in the mitigations=off mode.
👁 nginx benchmark with settings of Connections: 100. Ultra X7 358H: mitigations=off was the fastest.
👁 nginx benchmark with settings of Connections: 200. Ultra X7 358H: mitigations=off was the fastest.
In workloads that showed a significant performance difference to mitigations=off with older generation CPU cores, there was very little benefit on the Core Ultra Series 3 laptop from running in the mitigations=off Linux kernel mode.