Hardware/Software to Improve Spreadsheet Processing Time?

The benchmark that I'm using for performance here is the time it takes to fill 4 million cells with a simple =if function that checks for two conditions in a cell, then returns a cell value if the conditions are met (each cell with the =if function looks at one cell out of a field of 4 million cells with numerical data).

I've got an e6430s, which has a 3360m chip, 2.8 base GHz, 3.5 turbo. 4GB DDR3. Using Libre Office 5, it takes about 36 seconds to fill 4 million cells with the function.

At first I thought maybe the problem was a Libre vs Excel performance issue, or possibly ram, but I just tried out a machine with 8gb ram, 3320m chip (2.6 base, 3.2 turbo) running Excel 2016, and the same benchmark took about 46 seconds. So unless the particular machine that I was trying out was messed up in some way, ram and Libre vs Excel seems to be irrelevant, and this is all about CPU processing speed.

I'm pretty sure that increasing cores would be irrelevant (Libre doesn't support multicore processing, and they claim that spreadsheets don't really benefit much from it).

Later generation intel CPU's seem to have mostly focused on energy savings and things other than processing power, and seem to have lower turbo GHz, so it could be that a later generation chip would only have worse performance. I'm not sure about AMD's

Originally I was hoping to get the processing time down to 12 seconds, but that may simply not be possible for a machine in the $200-$400 range.

I'm not sure I want to do something as involved (and risky) as trying to overclock a chip, but that might be the only reasonable option.

 

It's just CSV. Write a couple lines of Java to do the same. Then you can multi process as much as you want.

I'll write it for $100. Or just send it to AWS, and divide the work among multiple machines.

 

I don't know for sure, but I'd be surprised if Linux + LibreOffice didn't run quicker than Windows + Excel on the same machine. Microsoft software is notorious for being bloatware. You can even get a cursor lag with Word on a modern machine, which is just ridiculous for a glorified text editor.

In terms of general computing power, RAM is now up to DDR4. I found this 2017 article comparing DDR3 with DDR4:

DDR3 vs DDR4 RAM: Is It Worth The Upgrade? | Beebom

Here is a benchmark comparison for your chip:

PassMark - Intel Core i5-3360M @ 2.80GHz - Price performance comparison