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.

Comments

What about the rest of it? And Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, it's fantastic that LibreOffice spreadsheet calculations are faster now. But what good is that when the rest of it is so goddamn bloated? I installed it recently on my brand new Mac and it was like 600 MB or something fucked like that! I mean, come on! And it was so slow, and I don't mean the spreadsheet calculations. The rest of the GUI was just real sluggish. No other apps on my Mac are this slow except Firefox. Maybe these AMD dudes and dudettes can use their GPU and graphics know-how to speed up the fucking slow-as-molasses LibreOffice GUI and once they're done with that they should go to work on Firefox. Jesus Christ, does Firefox need some speed ups! Mozilla hasn't been able to do anything useful in like a decade now, so maybe these AMD dudes and dudettes can wrangle it into something fast.

Re: Title condradicts summary

[loufoque]

A GPU is not 500 times faster than a CPU, more like 2 or 3 times, and that's if you have more computation than data.
The speedup is caused by writing the software correctly, not by using magic hardware.