Yes, Intel will often cite performance characteristics without the patches applied, and shame on them for that. And, Yes, it would be interesting to know how much of Intel's performance lead pre-Ryzen was due to this bad speculative execution microcode; it seems likely that AMD wasn't as far behind as everyone thought, but the past is the past.

But the debt is now paid, and Intel still leads in single-core performance. Really, they've never not led in single-core performance (maybe going back to the late-90s Athlon days they were trailing). That's something an Intel shill would tell you, but it's also something anyone can find out just by looking at the benchmarks or doing their own testing. Marketing is mostly lies, but those lies stop when I hold the silicon in my hands.

From what I've heard, Intel likes to run their benchmarks with many (most?) mitigations disabled... but Windows ships with all of them enabled.

Meanwhile, we can compare the security track record of SEV vs SGX to see some real meat. SEV has been cracked completely and repeatedly by simple C or cryptography programming errors like buffer overflows or not checking for points being on the curve. SGX has had no such errors, every single attack on it has been an exotic statistical side channel attack. The last round weren't even practical. Researchers studied it for a year and couldn't actually make it work against real enclaves, but Intel issued CVEs and mitigations for it anyway, just in case. And the root level of SGX was never cracked, which is why it's always been software patchable/renewable without needing new silicon. AMD SEV has needed new silicon more than once.

SGX has held up pretty well given it was born just before the discovery of an entire class of CPU design vulnerabilities.

Can you point at recent information on this?