Bang for the Buck: Vector Search on Cloud CPUs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kuffo, Leonardo, Boncz, Peter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kuffo, Leonardo
Boncz, Peter
author_facet Kuffo, Leonardo
Boncz, Peter
contents Vector databases have emerged as a new type of systems that support efficient querying of high-dimensional vectors. Many of these offer their database as a service in the cloud. However, the variety of available CPUs and the lack of vector search benchmarks across CPUs make it difficult for users to choose one. In this study, we show that CPU microarchitectures available in the cloud perform significantly differently across vector search scenarios. For instance, in an IVF index on float32 vectors, AMD's Zen4 gives almost 3x more queries per second (QPS) compared to Intel's Sapphire Rapids, but for HNSW indexes, the tables turn. However, when looking at the number of queries per dollar (QP$), Graviton3 is the best option for most indexes and quantization settings, even over Graviton4 (Table 1). With this work, we hope to guide users in getting the best "bang for the buck" when deploying vector search systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_07621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bang for the Buck: Vector Search on Cloud CPUs
Kuffo, Leonardo
Boncz, Peter
Databases
Artificial Intelligence
Vector databases have emerged as a new type of systems that support efficient querying of high-dimensional vectors. Many of these offer their database as a service in the cloud. However, the variety of available CPUs and the lack of vector search benchmarks across CPUs make it difficult for users to choose one. In this study, we show that CPU microarchitectures available in the cloud perform significantly differently across vector search scenarios. For instance, in an IVF index on float32 vectors, AMD's Zen4 gives almost 3x more queries per second (QPS) compared to Intel's Sapphire Rapids, but for HNSW indexes, the tables turn. However, when looking at the number of queries per dollar (QP$), Graviton3 is the best option for most indexes and quantization settings, even over Graviton4 (Table 1). With this work, we hope to guide users in getting the best "bang for the buck" when deploying vector search systems.
title Bang for the Buck: Vector Search on Cloud CPUs
topic Databases
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07621