On the same day that Intel released Skylake for mainstream enthusiasts, The Document Foundation has published LibreOffice 5.0. This version brings a 64-bit version for Windows, which is another baby-step in the application's trend toward performance and stability improvements. There doesn't seem to be too many features to point to, besides new branding images, but it's the first release in their 5.0 branch. It is also numbered 5.0.5 because pre-releases don't want us to have nice things.
Despite having a supported 64-bit version, the 32-bit x86 build is still default when you go to the download page. If you manually select the x86-64 version's installer, it will erase previous, standard installs of LibreOffice 4 x86. I'm not sure if selecting a custom folder will change that, in case you wanted side-by-side installs for some reason, but it is also nice that the installer cleans up the previous version.
You can download it for free from their site. You will need to scroll down for the 64-bit version.
Just go read the article, and
Just go read the article, and forum posts at the Register, as they have more to say about the performance improvements. The forum posters have also begun to test the new version, and there are some minor problems, but nothing that is a reason to not update to the latest as of yet. It’s good to wait and see if you are using LibreOffice in a production environment, but that is always the case for any new software. Now what readers need even more is someone watching out for any Linux based Carrizo laptops, and the lack of 1080p antics are happening again with AMD’s SKUs and laptops, as well as the lack of Carrizo laptop options with the 35 watt Carrizo part. I’m seriously looking for a full wattage(35W) Carrizo SKU paired with a discrete AMD GPU for graphics work, If only the system 76 folks would take notice. Those quad core anything CPU’s are not going to stack up against the GPU for rendering workloads, and Blender 3D now has Cycles rendering support for GCN based GPUs. 4 Excavator cores are plenty when all the rendering calculations are being done on the GPU. I can’t wait for Greenland graphics and the affordable systems on an Interposer that will be coming for the workstation systems.
LibreOffice seems to be one
LibreOffice seems to be one of many apps that is 100% HSA compliant working very fast on AMD APU’s from Kaveri and above !
Everyone is now using OpenCl
Everyone is now using OpenCl to accelerate more computing on the GPU, and eventually the CPU cores on future HSA compliant versions of the APU will actually directly dispatch floating point calculations to the GPU’s floating point units without having to go through any software abstraction layers. I can see future APU’s CPU cores and their GPU accelerators becoming so integrated that it will be hard to tell them apart, and that includes the chaining of 32 bit floating points units to make double and quad or more precision calculations possible in the hardware, so it’s going to be like having variable width FP units in blocks of 32 bits up to maybe 1024, or 2048 if that is ever needed. I can see even more of any computing software moving as much computations onto the GPU as possible, and any CPU bound hardware not HSA compliant as being at a definite disadvantage.