They might be 30% slower in virtualization and should be about 5-7% slower in real world usage. As a heavy user of the cloud I'm worried about my infra more than about my laptop: if my cloud setup gets even 7% slower overnight it won't be good to say the least, especially with lower-clock 2Ghz Skylake GCP CPUs.
Those 5--7% will make me feel like I'm powered by Atom and it will be even worse for single-core bounded workloads in the cloud.
>They might be 30% slower in virtualization and should be about 5-7% slower in real world usage.
Virtualization IS real-world-usage. This is going to damage Intel where it will hurt the most, the datacenter (which is largely virtualized using VMware, or Hyper-V). The Xeon CPU's have some of the best profit margins for Intel. If they erode away to Epyc (which is finally becoming available) this could be pretty good for AMD's, espically since AMD has said the the past few years there strategy is to go after the datacenter market.
there's other real world usage (DAWs, for example, where there is a ton of I/O for sample-based virtual instruments) which will likely be as significantly impacted as virtualization likely...
Those 5--7% will make me feel like I'm powered by Atom and it will be even worse for single-core bounded workloads in the cloud.