- Tuesday, 24 November 2009
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Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair - George Burns
Adobe reaching for super Flash
ADOBE HAS apparently worked out that Flash seems a bit slow these days and is said to be working with Broadcom and Nvidia in trying to speed it up.
According to Trusted Reviews, Adobe is talking with both companies to enable GPU acceleration for Flash Player and enable hardware accelerated playback of HD based Flash video content on Atom systems.
If Adobe figures out GPU acceleration across the full range of Nvidia graphics chipsets it could mean that older Nvidia kit gets a new lease on life. It could also make Nvidia's Ion platform somewhat more attractive.
If Broadcom manages to improve Flash video performance on Intel Atom chips then its Crystal HD featured netbooks will be able to speed up HD content across a number of sites such as YouTube, BBC Iplayer, CBS and Pandora TV.
Broadcom might also optimise playback to consume less system power and reduce CPU utilisation. The new HP Mini 110XP netbook uses the Broadcom system, for one example.
Apparently the three firms should have this all worked out by the middle of next year. We wonder where this will leave those with ATI graphics chips or, conversely, whether this will still matter at all by then. µ
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Flash has always been slow, and I always wondered why it never used hardware acceleration before to compensate. It's about 10 years old and only NOW they're thinking about it?
For BB, the logical answer I think is that the designers of flash didn't want a situation to arise where having hardware acceleration was required in order to view flash content.
One of the things that makes flash so good is that it shows content across different hardware and software platforms in a consistent manner. Adding hardware assist may end up hurting more then helping if it ends up being required to view some content. If it is just a perk you get if your PC has hardware acceleration available then it's impact will be less likely to fracture flash's performance on different systems.
Then we are also going to see the Super Flash security hole?
Smells like a response to Microsoft’s very own silverlight 3 being hardware accelerated
I know Broadcom as a maker of ethernet controllers and server chipsets. What has Broadcom got that is common in netbooks and can accelerate Flash?
Although I applaud the efforts of Adobe to make their, as noted, slow Flash player a bit faster I think that the software community at large would benefit greatly from shifting over to HTML 5 <video support. Although this is a few years out in terms of practical usage, the browser-support for video could eliminate much of the need to speed Flash up as the slow downs come from Flash video. Speeding Flash up will help in the short term, but probably be meaningless in the long run to the common user. Flash would be better served to start finding new uses for its software as HTML 5 might be a solid and more maintainable alternative to Flash in the near future.