The Peculiar State Of CPU Security Mitigation Performance On Intel Tiger Lake

Stress-NG's context switching micro benchmark has long been an easy way of measuring the mitigation overhead. Indeed for here too it shows Tiger Lake's context switching speed being around 88% the speed of the mitigated performance.

The context switching speed measured by ctx-clock shows Tiger Lake behind Ice Lake regardless of mitigation speed and for that matter behind the context switching speed of the unmitigated older Whiskey Lake / Kaby Lake R parts.

These results have been rather surprising and without any immediate explanation.