Does this have corresponding speed ups or memory gains for normal CPUs too? Just thinking about all the cups of coffee that have been made and drunk while scikit-learn kmeans chugs through a notebook :)
For CPU with bigger K you would put the centroids in a search tree, so take advantage of the sparsity, while a GPU would calculate the full NxK distance matrix. So from my understanding the bottleneck they are fixing doesn't show up on CPU.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18875
from what I've seen I had the impression that Yinyang k-means was the best way to take advantage of the sparsity.