Part of the communication problem is that “high”, “performance”, and “needs” are all relative, which makes the combined phrase super-ambiguous. If you reach for

Part of the communication problem is that “high”, “performance”, and “needs” are all relative, which makes the combined phrase super-ambiguous. If you reach for a thing that’s advertised as “2x faster” because it means you’ll get your answer in one month instead of two, I think reasonable people would agree that’s a reasonable optimization in that specific case. If you reach for it simply because it’s advertised (perhaps not reliably) as “2x faster”, that’s more of a premature optimization if you don’t know along what axes, or under what conditions, that speedup obtains. Having said that, “2x improvement” can also be read as “an order of magnitude improvement (base 2)”, which does become more meaningful in general as x gets large.