ARM 4-BIT PQ: SIMD-based Acceleration for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search on ARM

Abstract: We accelerate the 4-bit product quantization (PQ) on the ARM architecture. Notably, the drastic performance of the conventional 4-bit PQ strongly relies on x64-specific SIMD register, such as AVX2; hence, we cannot yet achieve such good performance on ARM. To fill this gap, we first bundle two 128-bit registers as one 256-bit component. We then apply shuffle operations for each using the ARM-specific NEON instruction. By making this simple but critical modification, we achieve a dramatic speedup for the 4-bit PQ on an ARM architecture. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently achieves a 10x improvement over the naive PQ with the same accuracy.