The original post offers some more details on this matter: > For context, on newer CPUs such as on Skylake and beyond, Intel has refined the instructions used

The original post offers some more details on this matter: > For context, on newer CPUs such as on Skylake and beyond, Intel has refined the instructions used to disable branch speculation to be more specific to indirect branches, reducing the overall performance penalty of the Spectre mitigation. Older versions of Windows have a larger performance impact because Windows 7 and Windows 8 have more user-kernel transitions because of legacy design decisions, such as all font rendering taking place in the kernel. We will publish data on benchmark performance in the weeks ahead. Source: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/01/09/understanding-the-performance-impact-of-spectre-and-meltdown-mitigations-on-windows-systems/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/01/09/...