How a 60% speedup on Lucene vector search came from the CPU, not the algorithm

At OpenSearchCon Europe 2026, Amazon’s Shubham Chaudhary demonstrated how bypassing JVM limitations to implement native SIMD architecture achieved a 60% reduction in Lucene vector search latency. By targeting hardware-specific instructions for ARM CPUs like AWS Graviton, the team unlocked significant performance gains that are automatically integrated into updated OpenSearch versions.