Intel Atom D510: Pine Trail Boosts Performance, Cuts Power

No Flash Acceleration

Adobe’s Flash 10.1 beta enables DXVA acceleration of H.264 encoded Flash movies, we wrote about it a few weeks ago. It’s cross platform, it works on AMD, Intel and NVIDIA hardware - all you need is a GPU core that supports H.264 hardware acceleration. Ah, now you see the problem.

Without hardware H.264 acceleration, Pine Trail can’t playback full screen Hulu/Youtube videos at higher desktop resolutions without dropping frames.

The table below shows you what you can/can’t do:

In my opinion this is a serious issue with Pine Trail. You can argue that you don’t need to watch Blu-rays on the platform, but Flash video is everywhere online. It’s watchable full screen at 720p desktop resolutions or lower, but if you’ve got a higher res display you’re better off with Ion.

I can see Intel’s take on the situation - someone building a $75 platform isn’t likely to have a 1920 x 1200 display, but the problem is a bit more complex than that. Without H.264 decode acceleration, Flash videos take much more CPU time to decode - meaning that there’s less available CPU time to do anything you want to do in tandem.

If you’re not watching full screen flash videos on high res displays, then Pine Trail works, it’s just not the most elegant solution.