AMD has joined the LibreOffice project and will add the chip company's GPU acceleration system to the code base. The Document Foundation (TDF), which produces LibreOffice already has Intel involved, but needed AMD to use the firm's graphics processing engine to speed up spreadsheet calculations.

Manju Hegde, VP of heterogeneous solutions at AMD, in a statement said that it was great to work on LibreOffice with The Document Foundation to expose the raw power of AMD GPUs and APUs, initially to spreadsheet users.

"Bringing the parallelism and performance of our technology to traditional, mainstream business software users will be a welcome innovation for heavy duty spreadsheet users, particularly when combined with the compute capabilities of the upcoming generation of AMD Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) based products," he said.

It will mean that LibreOffice can move between CPU and GPU to get maximumand sharing the same access to memory for more seamless linkage. AMD already has open source optimization tools for OpenC, Python, Java, JavaScript, and C++ AMP to use the system.