Intel shooting itself in the foot
Forbidding benchmarking was stupid from the start.
First, it's not enforceable, because other than Intel there's no one care to enforcing their license.
Second, everyone in the tech community already know what these patches are for. It's for security with the drawback of lower performance. In another word, we already know there will be a performance hit.
Third, allowing benchmarking gives the customers the choice to decide whether or not they patch their system, in a security vs performance comparison. Banning it means they won't know why but the performance drop, causing more customers to move away from Intel product.
Intel, such license, many stupid, much backtracking, wow.