The Desktop CPU Security Mitigation Impact On Ubuntu 20.04
One of the most visible areas still with real-world performance hits from these mitigations is the web browser performance. The newer CPUs with some level of hardware mitigations are still showing some hit but generally less so than the older generations of processors.
Here is a look at the geometric mean from 46 tests ran in total across all of the desktop systems with mitigations on and off. The Core i9 9900KS and Core i9 10980XE processors with their hardware mitigations have much lower impact along with the Ryzen 7 3700X. Thanks to those hardware mitigations the performance hit overall was just in the 2~3% range while on older CPUs like the Core i7 8700K saw a 10~11% lower performance with the benchmarks ran for this article today. Keep in mind this comparison is just looking at the out-of-the-box mitigation impact and not with disabling Hyper Threading or taking other steps like the opt-in LVI mitigations.
Coming up in the next few days are our Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server mitigation benchmarks.
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