LibreOffice Lands A Ton Of GPU OpenCL Functions

[libv]

But there is grammar correction, it's been around for a while, but the linux version doesn't ship with it by default.

But is it hardware supported grammar correction? (and do check that link).

[Alex Sarmiento]

I was about to be surprised about the amount of whiners around here, until I forgot that I'm at phoronix where the majority of people who post have something to complain about.

What does surprise me is how self-centered some of you are. Sure, the average person has no use for hardware-accelerated spreadsheets, but you can't possibly speak for everyone. I have found LO is incredibly slow in comparison to Excel when it comes to spreadsheets longer than 5000 rows and more than 20 columns wide. Just using 1 more CPU core to take some of the load would make a huge difference. The sad part is sometimes the program crashes if the calculation is big enough, but works fine in Excel. I might hate MS and the bloatware that Office is, but I do have to admit that Office is a pretty solid platform and runs nicely.

I think this was a necessary feature to add, but it's too bad it's really only for financial purposes.

If LibreOffice is slow doing that, it might be a bad coded software problem, not lack of hardware acceleration problem. That is like trying to kill a bug with a shotgun.

[schmidtbag]

If LibreOffice is slow doing that, it might be a bad coded software problem, not lack of hardware acceleration problem. That is like trying to kill a bug with a shotgun.

Hardware acceleration is definitely part of the issue, but I could believe that there are ways it could be improved through software. I tried calculations on a large spreadsheet using a quad core system, and only 1 core was maxed out, with the other 3 being pretty much idle.

@libv
I don't really see the purpose in hardware accelerated grammar checking. That there, is like trying to kill a bug with a shotgun. Sure on older/slower systems there is a noticeable lag, but I personally never found it to be annoying or unproductive.

For the record, when I'm complaining about Calc's slowness, there have been times I waited over a minute for something to finish. On Excel, only a few seconds. I think Calc is a great piece of software, I just think OpenCL will be a major benefit to it.

[ciplogic]

Hardware acceleration is definitely part of the issue, but I could believe that there are ways it could be improved through software. I tried calculations on a large spreadsheet using a quad core system, and only 1 core was maxed out, with the other 3 being pretty much idle.

@libv
I don't really see the purpose in hardware accelerated grammar checking. That there, is like trying to kill a bug with a shotgun. Sure on older/slower systems there is a noticeable lag, but I personally never found it to be annoying or unproductive.

For the record, when I'm complaining about Calc's slowness, there have been times I waited over a minute for something to finish. On Excel, only a few seconds. I think Calc is a great piece of software, I just think OpenCL will be a major benefit to it.

It looks to me that your use case is document specific. At least for me no documents do load so slow. Did you create a bug in LO's bug database? As for accelerating using OpenCL I would say that gives another way to improve some uses of LO and I think that no one should complain. If there will be accelerated just for AMD systems, maybe will convince people with slow LO to use it later if they have an APU.

Look to this blog post, maybe fixes your issue http://www.lanedo.com/2013/how-your-...e-contributor/

[sarmad]

I am guessing this will be useful for the enterprise and for some research centers where you have scientists but not programmers.

Does anyone know if MS Excel utilize gpgpu as well?

[liam]

Why are they all so big on gpgpu?

They should first make use of the grammar correction some cheap display engines provide:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~libv/xf86-video-unichrome/tree/src/via_mode.c?id=754560ede562304e224a7bba8486f3523006ce81#n981

No amount of 3D engine trickery can beat that!

HARDWARE ACCELERATED grammar correction! WOOOHOOO!!!! Take that microsoft orfice!

[liam]

@libv
I don't really see the purpose in hardware accelerated grammar checking. That there, is like trying to kill a bug with a shotgun. Sure on older/slower systems there is a noticeable lag, but I personally never found it to be annoying or unproductive.

For the record, when I'm complaining about Calc's slowness, there have been times I waited over a minute for something to finish. On Excel, only a few seconds. I think Calc is a great piece of software, I just think OpenCL will be a major benefit to it.

You really need to look at his link....

[Artemis3]

286s and understanding Free (open source) again.

Cute, but pointless, since a word processor/etc. doesn't do nearly enough actual work to benefit perceptibly from this kind of thing. In fact, it'll run *just fine* on a 286.

What libreoffice really NEEDS.... RIGHT NOW, in an EMERGENCY, is to build support for mobile platforms, particularly ANDROID. There are nightlies for Android, but they do absolutely nothing and haven't changed AT ALL since they started being built many months ago.

Did you even bothered to test the difference of a 286 with and without a math co-processor? It meant things like autocad being useless without it. Memory fails, but I?m sure some spreadsheet software like Quattro performed much much better with it.

Of course the libreoffice code is probably unusable for such an old 16 bit architecture, and its associated memory constrains such as typical 2mb or ram; xorg, etc; long forgotten. It is very nearly assured, that in fact, you won't ever be able to run it in a 286.

Now lets see, open source is about people scratching their own itches; someone wanted to have this for fun, and did it. You are not the boss. Do YOU think Android is an emergency? Two choices: Pay people to do it, or do it yourself. Else, people will spend their own free time in whatever they feel they like. Someone wants yet another linux distro? Its their pet project, not yours.

If you see a developer doing something YOU consider totally useless, shut up or do (pay for) it yourself.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Did you even bothered to test the difference of a 286 with and without a math co-processor? It meant things like autocad being useless without it. Memory fails, but I?m sure some spreadsheet software like Quattro performed much much better with it.

Of course the libreoffice code is probably unusable for such an old 16 bit architecture, and its associated memory constrains such as typical 2mb or ram; xorg, etc; long forgotten. It is very nearly assured, that in fact, you won't ever be able to run it in a 286.

Now lets see, open source is about people scratching their own itches; someone wanted to have this for fun, and did it. You are not the boss. Do YOU think Android is an emergency? Two choices: Pay people to do it, or do it yourself. Else, people will spend their own free time in whatever they feel they like. Someone wants yet another linux distro? Its their pet project, not yours.

If you see a developer doing something YOU consider totally useless, shut up or do (pay for) it yourself.

I would love to hear that same speech regarding Canonical and MIR.

[mmstick]

I find it funny that people fail to realize the implications of this. This means even lower end devices can use spreadsheets, and create them larger. It means spreadsheets load quicker and expend less energy because OpenCL calculations on a GPU is more energy efficient than carrying it out on a CPU. If you have an AMD APU system, more power. If your Android device supports OpenCL with it's GPU, it's a no brainer.