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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.
It can be. Don't generalize to use cases you don't know, especially when people with no real programming skills are concerned. I honestly don't know any other software that is both as flexible and accessible as spreadsheets when it comes to doing computations on heaps of (mostly irregular) data.
People use the tools they are familiar with. There are plenty of business types who are goddamn magic wizards with a spreadsheet who completely freeze up at the thought of putting a database together. I've seen spreadsheets clicking over into the 3-400mb range that have been used for years in organizations and you know it could be managed much more efficiently, yet people resist because it's easier for them to make quick modifications than passing along requests to a database admin.
...Just in the last week, I have seen spreadsheets used for a program logic workflow, a timetable, a university course schedule, to compute an FFT, to exchange student marks, to discuss a budget (with lots of deletions and remarks), and even for a presentation. In each and every case a more suitable, open-source, freely available, multi-platform application exists.
You've just stated the reason people use spreadsheets right there. One multi-purpose program vs umpteen specialist programs, each with their own UI quirks that have to be learned to make the most use of the programs. Why bother when a good old spreadsheet will work.
Depends on what you mean by "faster." If you mean clock frequency, then perhaps. Also perhaps if you mean an individual core of a CPU vs a core of a GPU.
In this sense, it's the time to perform massively parallel instructions. GPUs are generally hundreds of times faster than CPUs for such calculations. Part of this is because a CPU can have a few cores, but a GPU generally has thousands of floating point units. The other part is that CPUs are general purpose central processors while GPUs are very specialized to optimize them for specific kinds of tasks.
Think of it like a CPU is 4 guys with Swiss Army Knives while a GPU is a team of 1,600 guys each with a battery powered, professional screwdriver. Guess which one's faster at screwing 1,600 wood screws into 400 posts for a building. Now guess which is faster at cutting a traced outline on a single piece of paper.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/w...
My opinion of Apple and Apple products has changed. Not that I'd ever buy an Apple product, but I went with a non-technical friend to an Apple store; she wanted me to go along when she bought a new Macbook. I was amazed at the high level of service and the extent of the support structure. She paid twice as much total for her Macbook as I paid for my Asus Zenbook (she bought the training and extended support which added $400 to the total), but she has a level of comfort that is rather high for a non-technical user.
I was pretty impressed, and I can see why people might want to buy the Apple brand. They don't care about the closed design and complete control by Apple. They want to have a place to go to get help and support, of a type and level that they can understand and feel good about. This particular Apple store was packed with people and always is. There's a reason, and I learned what it is that day.