How we built Elasticsearch simdvec to make vector search one of the fastest in the world
Summary
Elasticsearch simdvec is a hand-tuned SIMD kernel library powering every vector distance computation for vector search. The article explains why Elasticsearch built its own engine, details architecture-level optimizations on x86 and ARM, and contrasts performance with FAISS and jvector, highlighting memory-latency hiding and bulk scoring across quantization types.