Phoronix testing revealed a measurable performance impact on Intel Meteor Lake CPUs running on Linux systems with an up-to-date software stack. Recent benchmarks showed the geometric mean performance at 93% of the original figures observed in December 2023. This performance reduction, contrasting with typical gains on other hardware over time, is attributed to the Spectre BHI (Branch History Injection) vulnerability and its associated microcode and Linux kernel mitigations. These mitigations, released post-launch for Meteor Lake processors, have "revealed a measurable cost in a number of workloads" for Core Ultra CPUs.