The increasing demand for high-end equipment in crucial sectors such as aerospace, aeronautics, energy, power, information and electronics continues growing. However, the manufacturing of such advanced equipment poses significant challenges owing to high-level requirements for loading, transmission, conduction, energy conversion, and stealth. These challenges are amplified by complex structures, hard-to-cut materials, and strict standards for surface integrity and precision. To overcome these barriers in high-end equipment manufacturing, high-performance manufacturing (HPM) has emerged as an essential solution. This paper firstly discusses the key challenges in manufacturing technology and explores the essence of HPM, outlining a quantitative relationship between design and manufacturing. Subsequently, a generalized framework of HPM is proposed, accompanied by an in-depth exploration of the foundational elements and criteria. Ultimately, the feasible approaches and enabling technologies, supported by the analysis of two illustrative case studies are demonstrated. It is concluded that HPM is not just a precision and computational manufacturing framework with a core focus on multiparameter correlation in design, manufacturing, and service environments. It also represents a performance-geometry-integrated manufacturing framework for an accurate guarantee of the optimal performance.