The Desktop CPU Security Mitigation Impact On Ubuntu 20.04
The SQLite embedded database library that is widely used by different applications continues to show a minor performance impact from the default Intel CPU vulnerability mitigations. Fortunately, the newest Intel CPUs like the Core i9 9900KS and Core i9 10980XE showed no real difference to the performance while the more affected Intel CPUs saw up to a few percent hit.
Similarly with I/O tests via FIO, the mitigations by default on the older CPUs without hardware mitigations generally saw slightly better I/O performance when booting with the mitigations disabled.
But when moving to more interactive workloads like Compile Bench is where the performance penalty of these mitigations shows the more measurable impact of these mitigations. On the newer Intel and AMD CPUs with hardware mitigations the impact was still measurable but less so than the older CPUs.
Aside from I/O, Java workloads continue to be broadly impacted but at least the CPUs with some levels of hardware mitigation continue fairing better than the older parts.