
Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends. - prakash
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html
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terra_t
This ducks the real issue.

I'm not all that concerned about the efficiency of the codec and of the
mechanism that flushes video to the screen. That said, <video> in a web
browser that's codesigned to work on a platform is always going to give a
complex cross-platform app like Flash a run for the money.

I'm more concerned that Flash burns up CPU for no reason at all. I mean, my
Mac Mini hits 100% CPU and sounds like a helicopter taking off when I've got a
little tiny flash ad open on any tab. I got no trouble w/ internet ads, but
it's ridiculous that one stupid ad should be able to completely disable the
power management system on my computer.

~~~
goodness
Exactly. The article says that Flash isn't inherently slow. Is anything
inherently slow if you take time to optimize it? Why has Adobe/Macromedia
taken so long to get decent performance out of Flash?

I'd say the ball is in Adobe's court to actually make a version of Flash that
doesn't suck on the existing platforms.

~~~
fnid2
Because its easier, in a cross platform sense, to code to one device: the cpu.
Graphics libraries, GPUs, and drivers are _more_ different and thus require
more knowledge, experience, debugging, etc.

The performance of flash is good enough for Adobe. It's not good enough for
apple and, well, some of us. Steve Jobs called them lazy, precisely because
they don't make more effort in this department.

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jwecker
The post spends a lot of time talking about flash not utilizing / partially
utilizing / fully utilizing graphics cards and makes a lot of conclusions and
even takes a dig at apple about it. But then never bothers to ask the same
questions about html5. e.g., which browsers are natively using hardware
acceleration for H.264, if any? Apparently the author didn't find it relevant.
"I didn't contact any other companies because the tests are objective and
straightforward."

If flash only beats html5 when using hardware acceleration and html5 browsers
haven't introduced hardware acceleration yet, his conclusions end up
backwards, or at best completely irrelevant and speculative. _shrug_

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jamesk2
Steve Jobs hates flash for a lot of reasons but it is mostly because flash
runs faster/better on Windows than on Mac OS. This article quantifies what
people who use Mac, Windows and Linux know already: Flash is a hog outside of
Windows.

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freakwit
It's a hog inside windows, too.

~~~
jamesk2
Ha. It is but I think the point is that even before GPU assistance, Flash
works better in Windows than on the Mac. It makes sense for Steve Jobs to
pressure Adobe into improving the Mac version. HTML5 is turning out to be the
hammer that forces Adobe to innovate.

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madair
Famous last words: "Since the comparative efficiency of x vs. y seemed easy
enough to quantify, I endeavored to do so..."

