Benchmarking AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPUs Following Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, Zombieload

In applications mostly limited to user-space activities, there of course isn't much of an impact by these different CPU security vulnerability mitigations.

From these mitigations we have found code compilation performance to be slightly lowered on Intel systems and obviously more if disabling HT/SMT over concerns about its security. If doing without HT, the Core i7 2700K and 3700K CPUs drop to building the Linux kernel slower than the AMD FX-8320E/8370E.

Compiling the large LLVM code-base saw AMD CPUs delivering around the same level of performance while the Intel systems were slightly impacted and more so once going without HT.