What are the criticisms regarding the performance of HTM?
Criticisms against Jeff Hawkins are well summarized in the following essay taken from 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/29/hawkins_ai_feature/

I myself believe that the HTM theory has a huge potential and will be a foundation of true machine intelligence. IBM recently announced to back up the HTM theory and started the Cortical Learning Center including some hundred members.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/536326/ibm-tests-mobile-computing-pioneers-controversial-brain-algorithms/

As is pointed out in the essay, Dillep George, a cofounder of Numenta, made the startup Vicarious, which attracted a huge amount of fund, of which fact suggests a potential of the HTM theory.


  Source: Criticisms against Jeff Hawkins, The Register
  
  His media-savvy, confident approach appears to have stirred up some
  ill feeling among other academics who point out, correctly, that
  Hawkins hasn't published widely, nor has he invented many ideas on his
  own.
  
  Numenta has also had troubles, partly due to Hawkins' idiosyncratic
  view on how the brain works.
  
  In 2010, for example, Numenta cofounder Dileep George left to found
  his own company, Vicarious, to pick some of the more low-hanging fruit
  in the promising field of AI. From what we understand, this amicable
  separation stemmed from a difference of opinion between George and
  Hawkins, as George tended towards a more mathematical approach, and
  Hawkins to a more biological one.
  
  Hawkins has also come in for a bit of a drubbing from the
  intelligentsia, with NYU psychology professor Gary Marcus dismissing
  Numenta's approach in a New Yorker article headlined Steamrolled by
  Big Data.
  
  Other academics El Reg interviewed for this article did not want to be
  quoted, as they felt Hawkins' lack of peer-reviewed papers combined
  with his entrepreneurial persona reduced the credibility of his entire
  approach.
  
  Hawkins brushes off these criticisms and believes they come down to a
  difference of opinion between him and the AI intelligentsia.
  
  "These are complex biological systems that were not designed by
  mathematical principles [that are] very difficult to formalize
  completely," he told us.