Adobe Enables Flash GPU Acceleration in OS X, We Test It
Brandon Hill, Editor in Chief of DailyTech, IMed me an hour ago with this: "OK, stop laying on the couch with your iPad and do some OS X benchmarking". He ended the IM with a link to a DT article stating that less than a week after Apple opened hooks into NVIDIA's VP2 decode engine, Adobe delivered a version of Flash 10.1 with GPU acceleration under OS X (Windows users have had it for six months now).
Impressive turnaround time for a company that has recently been thrashed by Apple quite a bit. It just goes to show one thing: there's no room for ego in engineering. Adobe claims the beta only supports Flash acceleration on the GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M, however in my testing it worked fine on EVGA's GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition. The tests below look at CPU utilization of the Flash plugin alone in Chrome (this is single core CPU utilization). The column on the left is without GPU acceleration, the one on the right with GPU acceleration:
| Adobe Flash GPU Acceleration in OS X 10.6 - CPU Utilization | ||||
| Flash 10.0.45.2 | Flash 10.1 Gala (GPU Acceleration On) | |||
| Hulu - Glee - 480p (Window) | 105% | 107% | ||
| Hulu - Glee - 480p (Full Screen) | 140% | 117.8% | ||
| YouTube - Karate Kid Trailer - 720p | 116% | 51% | ||
| YouTube - Karate Kid Trailer - 1080p | 141% | 67.4% | ||
While hardware acceleration doesn't appear to work on Hulu's website, there's definitely an improvement in CPU utilization when scaling to full screen. YouTube is a different story however. CPU utilization is cut roughly in half. The fact that it's taken this long is upsetting, but at least we're making some progress. You can tell the GPU acceleration is working if you see a little white square in the upper left hand corner of your YouTube video:
Because the GPU acceleration only works on NVIDIA hardware, owners of the new 15/17-inch MacBook Pros will tradeoff lower battery life for lower CPU utilization (the NV GPU has to be powered up during Flash video playback). Hopefully this is just the first step as there's no reason why Intel's HD graphics can't offer the same H.264 acceleration as the NVIDIA GPUs.
And to set the record straight, I wasn't laying on the couch with my iPad.
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Apple's Intrinsity Acquisition: Winners and Losers
Intrinsity is not a name immediately recognized by today's average consumer. However, keen followers of the application processor market recognize its claim to fame as the firm behind the Cortex-A8 implementations (called the Hummingbird) in the Apple A4 and Samsung Galaxy S.
Apple's acquisition of the semiconductor firm Intrinsity has been doing the rounds on the Internet since the beginning of April. With many former Intrinsity employees publicly disclosing their employment with Apple now, Apple's quarterly earnings report indicating business acquisitions for $325 million, and NYTimes confirming the acquisition from Apple's side, the only unknown quantity in the whole transaction seems to be the amount shelled out by Apple for the purchase. The acquisition wasn't entirely unexpected once it was realized that PA Semi had nothing to do with the A4, and Apple had plans for the A4 family much beyond the iPad.
Microprocessor Report's Tom Halfhill has an excellent piece on why Apple wanted Intrinsity, and suggests that the purchase price was around $121 million. Another group of industry insiders, however, believe that Apple may have actually got a far better deal by completing the asset acquisition for a much lesser amount. How did Apple manage to gobble up Intrinsity? What is the cause for people's varied estimates of the purchase price, and why would both Apple and Intrinsity want to keep the purchase price a secret? How would the acquisition play out for the two companies, considering the fact that Apple's two previous semiconductor acquisitions haven't been especially successful? More importantly, what would the acquisition mean for the rest of the players in the market? Read on to find out the winners and losers in this transaction.
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OCZ's Vertex 2, Special Sauce SF-1200 Reviewed
Last week we reviewed OCZ's Agility 2 SSD with SandForce's standard, mass production SF-1200 firmware. This week we're back with the Vertex 2. For an extra $20 you get roughly the same performance as the Agility 2 plus an extra boost in small file random write speed.
Read on for our full review of the Vertex 2.
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NVIDIA's Updated Verde Driver Program
Last week, NVIDIA held a conference call and presentation to let us know about updates to their Verde driver program. Initially rolled out in 2008, the Verde program was a way to deal with the difficult problem of providing updated drivers for laptops. Most OEMs will only update their official driver if there's a critical bug, and a single game failing to run properly generally doesn't qualify as "critical". The original commitment was to provide at least quarterly driver updates, which was good though obviously there was room for improvement.
Now, NVIDIA is ready to address the one remaining omission: timeliness of mobile driver releases. There are some other tidbits as well, but the big news is that starting with the upcoming May release, NVIDIA will have concurrent desktop and laptop driver updated. The drivers will cover everything from ION netbooks to beastly SLI notebooks, with only a few laptops missing the driver gravy train. Read on for more details.
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TigerDirect Offers $50 MIR on Phenom II X6 CPUs - Dead Deal
Early this morning AMD officially launched its first six-core Thuban processors: the Phenom II X6 1090T and 1055T. The last thing we would dream of doing is complain about pricing on these parts. AMD is selling you almost a billion transistors for $199 or $285 depending on what clock speed you want.
AMD just sent us word that the pricing story gets even better. TigerDirect is running a $50 mail in rebate on the new X6 processors dropping the price down to $149.99 and $249.99 for the 1055T and 1090T, respectively. While we're not huge fans of mail in rebates, if you're fine with getting a check in the mail sometime later then you honestly can't beat these deals. At $149.99 there simply is no answer to AMD's Phenom II X6 1055T.
Update: The deal is dead, congrats to those who got in.
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