Because it's dead wrong, laughably so, in the assertion that speculative execution is a ~5% performance hit (it would, in reality, result in a couple of orders

Because it's dead wrong, laughably so, in the assertion that speculative execution is a ~5% performance hit (it would, in reality, result in a couple of orders of magnitude slowdown on desktop workloads). As noted elsewhere OP completely misunderstood the fact that his CPU has received some of Intel's Spectre mitigation firmware patches and came to the silly conclusion that this meant his CPU was no longer doing speculative execution of any sort. HN is still a (vaguely) computer-savvy forum. Being extremely wrong about the fundamentals of how a modern CPU works is going to get you downvoted.