The silicon did get slower due to a few mitigations, and in 2018, Intel was thinking about forcing a lot more of them on us in silicon (eg the equivalent of ret

The silicon did get slower due to a few mitigations, and in 2018, Intel was thinking about forcing a lot more of them on us in silicon (eg the equivalent of retpolines, but in silicon). The HFT industry and some HPC folks (and I assume some people from gaming) were involved in convincing Intel to keep those mitigations in software. EDIT: One fun fact here is that AMD never did the unsafe performance optimizations that Intel had to remove from their silicon. Spectre and Meltdown mitigations were instrumental in closing the gap between Intel and AMD.