RAG Float8 Quantization: 4x Storage Reduction with <0.3% Performance Loss — Combine with PCA for 8x Total Compression

SpringerLink·medium signal

Recent RAG storage optimization benchmarks show that float8 embedding quantization achieves 4x storage reduction with less than 0.3% performance loss compared to float32 baselines. Combining float8 with moderate PCA dimensionality reduction yields 8x total compression with less degradation than int8 alone. For production RAG systems storing millions of embeddings, this translates to cutting vector database costs by 75-87% while maintaining retrieval quality. Validated in SpringerLink published research.