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

A real strange one was the eSpeak-NG speech synthesis results where the Tiger Lake performance with mitigations disabled led to a very measurable hit to the performance that returned the CPU to the Ice Lake performance level.

TensorFlow Lite is a bit of a strange one as it's normally not a workload where we are used to seeing much change from the CPU security mitigations but in the case of mitigations=off was consistently showing lower performance than with the default mitigations.

The SQLite embedded database library test also showed Tiger Lake coming in slightly behind the default mitigated state.