Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Flash, a CPU hog?

Apple messiah Steve Jobs has recently been on a criticism spree for the graphics company Adobe Inc. While Steve had said that he won't be using Flash for his iPad just like the iPhones calling Adobe as "lazy" and offering "lousy" software, he recently reaffirmed that consumers won't be seeing any flash content on iPad even though competitors may be doing so. According to Steve Jobs, Adobe's Flash is a big time CPU hog and running a flash based content on iPad could reduce the battery life from estimated 10 hours to a meagre 1.5 hours.
Of course the fault isn't with the iPad's processor but with Adobe's Flash, as said by him.

Steve Jobs even went to the extent of comparing Adobe's Flash technology to the now obsolete floppy drives and the likes. According to him Flash is a dying technology and that HTML5 is the answer as its replacement. Many analysts however seem to think that Flash is not dying yet and that Steve may be over reacting on it.

Whatever be the case, many enthusiasts have actually tried out a series of experiments based on this report to see if there really is a problem with Flash. It has been found out that when playing media content on Divx or Xvid, the battery last almost 2 to 3 times longer on a portable computer and that the CPU usage is around 10-30% compared to 40-70% for flash based contents.

I couldn't try it out myself because I have internet connection problem here in my hostel. Am using a measly 256Kbps rated connection which actually gives me below 100Kbps most of the times. You could try experimenting yourself though. For flash based media you could use YouTube or MetaCafe against watching Divx stuff on internet or on your computer itself. Use a good media player though. You could avoid the default Windows Media Player for this.

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