Intel CPU Security Mitigation Costs From Haswell Through Panther Lake Review

A benchmarking analysis of Intel CPU security mitigation performance costs spanning from Haswell-era laptops to the new Panther Lake Core Ultra X7 358H. The study compares default kernel mitigation settings against a mitigations=off boot configuration on Linux 6.19/Ubuntu 26.04. Panther Lake still requires mitigations for Spectre V1, Spectre V2, BHI, and Speculative Store Bypass, but is unaffected by older vulnerabilities like Meltdown, MDS, L1TF, and Retbleed. The results show that newer Intel generations have significantly reduced mitigation overhead compared to older CPUs.