AMD joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board to accelerate LibreOffice

Berlin, July 3rd, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that AMD is now a member of its Advisory Board. AMD is a leading designer and integrator of pioneering technologies that are at the heart of the digital devices people use and experience daily, pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

“It is great to work on LibreOffice with The Document Foundation to expose the raw power of AMD GPUs and APUs, initially to spreadsheet users,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Solutions at AMD. “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.”

“It is exciting to work together with AMD and their ecosystem to take advantage of AMD’s cutting edge innovation right inside LibreOffice,” said Michael Meeks, SUSE Distinguished Engineer and TDF Board Member, “The growth in performance and parallelism available in the GPUs of today, and particularly with AMD’s revolutionary APUs of tomorrow, is something we’re eager to expose to LibreOffice users.”

HSA is an innovative computing architecture that enables CPU, GPU and other processors to work together in harmony on a single piece of silicon by seamlessly moving the right tasks to the best suited processing element. This makes it possible for larger, more complex applications to take advantage of the power that has traditionally been reserved for more focused tasks. While the biggest impact will be for AMD APU users, supporting benefits of the work will improve the LibreOffice core data structures enabling larger spreadsheets to calculate faster for all users. This is only the start of exposing the power of the HSA enabled APU to business users providing better analytics and decision making across the board from finance to science.

With the addition of AMD, the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation now has eleven members: AMD, Google, RedHat, SUSE, Intel, Lanedo, the King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST), the Inter-Ministry Mutalisation for an Open Productivity Suite (MIMO), the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Software in the Public Interest, and Freies Office Deutschland e.V.

About AMD

AMD (NYSE: AMD) is a semiconductor design innovator leading the next era of vivid digital experiences with its groundbreaking AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that power a wide range of computing devices. AMD’s server computing products are focused on driving industry-leading cloud computing and virtualization environments. AMD’s superior graphics technologies are found in a variety of solutions ranging from game consoles, PCs to supercomputers. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.

About The Document Foundation (TDF)

The Document Foundation is the entity behind the popular LibreOffice Office Suite. It is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and warmly welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of April 30, 2013, TDF has over 150 members and over 2,000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.

Media Contacts TDF

Florian Effenberger (based near Munich, Germany, UTC+1)
Phone: +49 8341 99660880 – Mobile: +49 151 14424108
E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org

Charles H. Schulz (based in Paris, France, UTC+1)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org

Eliane Domingos de Sousa (based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, UTC-3)
E-mail: elianedomingos@documentfoundation.org – Skype: elianedomingos

Italo Vignoli (based in Milan, Italy, UTC+1)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
Skype: italovignoli – GTalk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com

Media Contact AMD

Kristen Lisa
Phone: +1 (512) 602 6020
E-Mail: kristen.lisa@amd.com