RAG Document Ingestion: Why CPU-First Beats GPU Guessing

Most RAG deployments fail upstream, not downstream. When your document ingestion pipeline treats every PDF the same, you inherit chaos at retrieval time—and no LLM can fix bad source data. This is where CPU-first document ingestion strategy becomes your competitive edge, especially on constrained hardware like Raspberry Pi 5. The real win is not picking the fanciest parser. It is routing cheap extraction to expensive OCR only when the evidence demands it. CPU-First Document Ingestion for RAG on