Systems and methods to accelerate compression and decompression with a search unit implemented in the processor core. According to an embodiment, a search unit may be implemented to perform compression or decompression on an input stream of data. The search unit may use a look-up table to identify appropriate compression or decompression symbols. The look-up table may be populated with a table derived using the variable length coding symbols of a sequence of vertices to be compressed or extracted from a received data stream to be decompressed. A comparator and a finite state machine may be implemented in the search unit to facilitate traversal of the look-up table.