Benchmarking Flash Player 10

Performance still sucks on Mac OS X compared to Windows Vista. Using the exact same computer (four-core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM), Hulu video playback consumes 56 percent CPU on Mac OS X 10.5 vs. just 7 percent on Vista. Flash video playback is about eight times more efficient on Windows. And yet people wonder why Apple isn’t anxious to get Flash on the iPhone.

Update: “Eight times more efficient” may well be the wrong conclusion, in that the 56 percent figure for Mac OS X is for one of the four CPU cores, whereas the 7 percent figure for Windows may be 7 percent of all available CPU cycles. Even so, it’s still twice as efficient on Windows than on Mac OS X.

★ Monday, 20 October 2008