Not really, that doesn't make sense. It's "0.5x the speed of b". Saying "faster" when it's really actually slower is just confusing and ungrammatical. Likewise saying "1x faster" when it's actually the same speed is gratuitously confusing.
What doesn't make sense? Saying "A is 50% faster than B" is equivalent to "A is 150% as fast as B". Same goes for "A is 0.5x faster than B" which is equivalent to "A is 1.5x as fast as B".
There is a very distinct difference between "faster than" and "as fast as" which should be very clear now.
You're 100% right (2x right?), but I think this is one of those situations like "bimonthly", where people usually intend it to mean twice a month instead of every two months.
It's completely ambiguous with potentially significant costs for misunderstanding, but people refuse to make themselves clear, just because.
For "A was 50% faster than B", it could very easily be B which is faster -- and A is half its speed.
What I meant to say in my parent comment is not the use of "faster" vs "as fast" in English, but that usually in those benchmarks "Nx" means N times the speed of the baseline.
Again, I wasn't talking about what's it in "proper english" -- but how it's used in benchmarks.
Kevin Decker, who did the site in TFA, is a native english speaker, and yet he writes "1.5x faster" to mean baseline1.5 (and not baseline + 1.5baseline).
So clearly it's not so "unambiguous" whether you can use faster in this way or not. And in fact, I've never seen any of those benchmarks where "Nx" doesn't mean the final value is N*baseline.
This confused the heck out of me as a kid. Saying something is 50% faster means the same as being 150% faster. Or 100% faster could also be 200%, depending on subtle language choices.
