Every element of a matrix multiplication is a dot-product of two vectors. The dot-product of two vectors quantifies their similarity -- in fact, we call it "dot-product similarity" in a nearest-neighbors context: If the dot product > 0, the vectors point in similar directions; if It's not too hard to imagine that it might be possible to learn representative K-means clusters of training vectors and then, at run-time,…
Isn't that basically the same as replacing your hardware multiplication operations with a hardware lookup table?