Adobe finds hardware helpers for Flash

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 07:24

IT Industry - Development

David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of Adobe's platform business unit chimed in with "Nvidia's unique expertise makes it an ideal partner for Adobe to integrate cutting-edge graphics and video acceleration into the Adobe Flash Platform, benefiting all types of devices."

"Flash Player will leverage the power of the GPU to provide a rich, desktop-compatible Web experience on a wide range of devices," added Wadhwani.

No timeframe was mentioned for the arrival of an Nvidia-optimised version of Flash Player.

The Adobe/Nvidia collaboration is part of the Open Screen Project, which aims to deliver web content and standalone applications to a wide range of computing and consumer electronic devices including TVs.

The Broadcom announcement was similar, but more specific. Adobe and Broadcom are working on hardware acceleration that will allow the playback of high-definition Flash video on Atom-based netbooks and other devices, such as the HP Mini 110 XP.

The Broadcom Crystal HD chip has also been adopted by Acer for certain Aspire One netbooks.

An optimised version of Flash Player will be able to display HD content from sites such as YouTube and the BBC iPlayer without sapping the CPU and with very low power consumption. Its delivery is expected in the first half of 2010.

There's more about Flash for Crystal HD on page 3.