I cannot prove this yet but I believe there has been a big performance hit in the cloud providers.

I use amazon for a couple of lightly loaded servers

Attached is the traffic graph from the last 2 weeks.

Nothing has changed but for the reboot required by AWS as part of their patch roll out.

The reboot was at Tue Jan  2 09:02.

It may be just coincidence but the huge step-wise increase in base load is just crazy given nothing on my side changed but for the reboot.

So I take exception with Intel's comment that most folks will not notice the performance hit.