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LibreOffice Calc Set To Get GPU Powered Boost From AMD

darthcamaro writes "We all know that the open source LibreOffice Calc has been slow — forever and a day. That's soon going to change thanks to a major investment made by AMD into the Document Foundation. AMD is helping LibreOffice developers to re-factor Calc to be more performance and to be able to leverage the full power of GPUs and APUs. From the article: '"The reality has been that Calc has not been the fastest spreadsheet in the world," Suse Engineer Michael Meeks admitted. "Quite a large chunk of this refactoring is long overdue, so it's great to have the resources to do the work so that Calc will be a compelling spreadsheet in its own right."'" Math operations will be accelerated using OpenCL, unit tests are being added for the first time, and the supposedly awful object oriented code is being rewritten with a "modern performance oriented approach."

2 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. If you need it you are doing it wrong. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If your spreadsheet needs a gpu to speed up calculations, you are probably misusing spreadsheets. I know most accountants love the spreadsheet and they make insanely complicated things using spreadsheets pushing it far beyond what these are designed to do. But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute, you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. by Russ1642 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Custom database applications are expensive and inflexible. Stop trying to tell people what they can't do with a spreadsheet.