Equation 2 · The Hidden Infrastructure Bill Behind Every RAG Answer

What does this equation mean?

S

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index size in gigabytes. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.

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S

Symbol S

index size in gigabytes.

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How to interpret it

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What the article says around this equation

where S is index size in gigabytes, r(S) is Pinecone’s documented read units per query as a function of that size, Q is monthly query volume, and $p_{\mathrm{store}}$ , $p_{\mathrm{ru}}$ , and $p_{\mathrm{rerank}}$ are the published per-unit rates given earlier. Set against it, the cost of skipping retrieval and instead inlining a fixed block of extra context on every single call is

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