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AMD Forces a LibreOffice Speed Boost With GPU Acceleration

New submitter samtuke writes: AMD processors get rated and reviewed based on performance. It is in our self-interest to make things work really, really fast on AMD hardware. AMD engineers contribute to LibreOffice, for good reason. Think about what happens behind a spreadsheet calculation. There can be a huge amount of math. Writing software to take advantage of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for general purpose computing is non-trivial. We know how to do it. AMD engineers wrote OpenCL kernels, and contributed them to the open source code base. Turning on the OpenCL option to enable GPU Compute resulted in a 500X+ speedup, about ¼ second vs. 2minutes, 21 seconds. Those measurements specifically come from the ground-water use sample from this set of Libre Office spreadsheets.

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  1. Re:What about the rest of it? And Firefox? by Daemonik · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Or possibly stop using a Mac and switch to the platform it's optimized for, ie PC. Apple may own the phone, but they're still 2nd bastard cousin on the desktop.

    Besides, are you authorized by Cupertino to use ghetto opensource software on their sleek Williams Sonoma OS? Aren't you supposed to be using iLife or whatever it is the reanimated corpse of Steve masturbated out of his dessicated gonads? Wouldn't surprise me if there's code in the OS to slow down unapproved applications just to keep you in the Apple fence line anyway.