CPU Optimized Embeddings: Cut RAG Costs in Half (2026)
Introduction: If you are building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines today, mastering CPU Optimized Embeddings is no longer optional. Let's talk about the elephant in the server room. GPUs are expensive, incredibly hard to provision, and frankly, completely overkill for many document retrieval tasks. I know this because last year, my team was burning through nearly $15,000 a month on cloud GPU instances just to run vector embeddings for a massive corporate knowledge base. We hit a wall. We had to scale, but our CFO was ready to pull the plug on the entire AI initiative. That is when we discovered the raw power of utilizing modern CPU architectures for vector processing. Why You desperately Need CPU Optimized Embeddings Today Let's get straight to the facts. When you build a search engine or a RAG application, the embedding model is your primary bottleneck. Every single query, and every single document chunk, has to pass through this model to be...