This is partly what I was trying to convey with the "turning this aphorism into a question" fragment. Sometimes it is just not possible, or it is too expensive,

This is partly what I was trying to convey with the "turning this aphorism into a question" fragment. Sometimes it is just not possible, or it is too expensive, to increase hardware performance. Premature optimization, or at least one of its manifestations, is failing to consider the opposite.