It's safe to say that there's one thing that you don't mess around with, and that's performance. Enthusiasts don't spend hundreds of dollars on a processor to watch it underperform. Given the complicated nature of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, Microsoft's so-called mitigations were bound to have an impact on processor performance. The million dollar question was: Just how much? The initial estimate was somewhere around 30%, but Intel, being optimistic as usual, expected the performance impact to be insignificant for the average user. They recently provided some preliminary benchmark results that looked quite convincing too. Well, let's take a look at their findings, shall we?

Intel measured the mitgations' impact on CPU performance using their 6th, 7th, and 8th Generation Intel Core processors but, more specifically, the i7-6700K, i7-7920HQ, i7-8650U, and i7-8700K. The preferred operating system used in the majority of the benchmarks was Windows 10, however, Windows 7 also made a brief appearance. Intel chose four key benchmarks for their testing. SYSmark 2014 SE evaluated CPU performance on an enterprise level simulating office productivity, data and financial analysis, and media creation. PC Mark 10, on the other hand, tested performance in real-world usage employing different workloads like web browsing, video conferencing, application start-up time, spreadsheets, writing, and digital content creation. 3DMark Sky Diver assessed CPU performance in a DirectX 11 gaming scenario. Lastly, WebXPRT 2015 measured system performance using six HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads which include photo enhancement, organize album, stock option pricing, local notes, sales graphs, and explore DNA sequencing.The SYSmark 2014 SE overall results showed a moderate decrease in CPU performance between 6% to 8% with the i7-6700K the being the most affected. System responsiveness took the biggest hit with performance dropping up to 21% on the i7-6700K. The Responsiveness scenario tested activities like application launches, application installation, web browsing with many tabs open, file copies, photo manipulation, and multi-tasking - all of which are heavily influenced by the type of storage. So, don't let that i7-6700K with the hard drive result fool you. PCMark 10 registered penalties in the range of 3% to 4% with the i7-7920HQ being least affected. We weren't surprised to see that the mitigations didn't affect gaming performance in 3DMark Sky Diver, since we had already done our own tests in 21 different games. Results from WebXPRT 2015 reveal performance drops between 5% to 10%.