It wasn’t until 8’th gen that Intel had the micro code adjustments for Spectre and Meltdown to a place where they could remove the OS workarounds that killed system performance. By dropping support for those they got to remove very large portions of Kernel code and clean it up greatly. It was a shitty choice to have to make but there has to be a cut off somewhere.7th gen cpu. Which makes it the second most modern system in my house. Out of 6. This smells of planned obsolescence to me.