"Computers these days" have always been fast; if that were an argument for anything, performance would not matter at all anymore. If computing power is fungibl

"Computers these days" have always been fast; if that were an argument for anything, performance would not matter at all anymore. If computing power is fungible, then a 10% performance improvement translates into a 10% saving on the hardware budget. This matters for data centers, and it matters for embedded systems where using a slightly cheaper component in a million devices might mean saving a million dollars. I think the fallacy of the fast, modern computer comes from the fact that PCs are not very fungible at all; they come in discrete performance steps. And since your application is pretty unlikely to be the most demanding one, it will probably run just fine even without much optimization.