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Do Adobe apps use multiple cores or do they still use single core?

So will it make a difference in speed (in performance of the application) if I'm using a Pentium 4 processor (3 ghz) v/s a Dual Core Processor (2.7 ghz)

Edit: Have asked this question in StackOverflow, @ moderators you may close the question if you find that appropriate.

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  • You'll need to tell us exact Pentium 4 processor model number and exact dual core processor model number. Today frequencies may only be used to compare processors from same series. It can very easily happen that dual core processor is much faster than Pentium 4 even if the application is single threaded.
    – AndrejaKo
    Sep 2, 2010 at 17:18
  • @AndrejaKo: Yes, but that's largely irrelevant to the real question: whether AIR supports multiple processor cores.
    – Sasha Chedygov
    Sep 3, 2010 at 22:20
  • @musicfreak I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you mean by irrelevant. OP clearly asks for information in general and in a specific case. My comment here addresses specific case and my answer addresses general case.
    – AndrejaKo
    Sep 4, 2010 at 7:57
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    @AndrejaKo: I guess one of us misinterpreted it. I saw the two processor types as being just examples, with the main question being general and not system-specific.
    – Sasha Chedygov
    Sep 4, 2010 at 9:02

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I'd say that Adobe Air does not support multu-threading. Here are some sources for that claim. There may be some hacks to make it run in multithreading but as far as I see no official way and nothing user can do to make it multithreaded.

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  • all these articles seem to date around 2007-2008, adobe could have easily upgraded air to support multiprocessors though no where on their site can i find any official confirmations or denials of the same. Flash player supports multicore processors, wonder why air doesn't (that is if it doesn't)
    – rzlines
    Sep 3, 2010 at 21:25
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    @rzlines Some sources claim that AIR 2, which is the newest version, does not support multi-threading. Still, it's not a definitive answer. Maybe you should ask this on stackoverflow? Someone there will probably know.
    – AndrejaKo
    Sep 3, 2010 at 21:40
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if I'm using a Pentium 4 processor (3 ghz) v/s a Dual Core Processor (2.7 ghz)

You're missing a huge factor here: not all ghz are created equal. The Pentium 4 was a notoriously inefficient processor. A newer processor, even using only one core at a lower clock speed, will get a lot more work done per cycle than a Pentium 4 could ever hope to.

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Flash Player 10 has multicore.

However ActionScript doesn't yet do multithreading. There is talk of it finally being a definite yes, hopefully on a molehill.

I have a hard time believing AIR doesn't have the same multi-core support as Flash Player.

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This question has been asked more and more as time goes on. Do Adobe AIR or Flash apps utilize multiple cores or multithreading? So here is the official answer:

NO (as of May 2012).

(Multi-core or multi CPU processing is more accurately described as multithreading. A thread is a set of code that runs line by line. A CPU core can only execute 1 thread at a given point in time (unless it has hyperthreading - 2 threads at a time). A computer with 4 CPU's and 4 cores each CPU can run 16 threads at any given point in time. If a device only has one core than all running threads have to share that one core.) Both AIR and Flash are the same platform, and process code identically. If Flash implemented multithreading than so would AIR. The only difference between AIR and Flash are features.

There are 2 exceptions to this:

As of AIR 2.6 images loaded using Loader can be set to be decoded on a separate thread. As of AIR 3.2, Flash 11.2, Video is finally decoded on a separate thread. And depending on some factors and requirements, that separate thread that is handling the video data acts simply as a forwarder and forwards the video data to the GPU where the GPU distributes the decoding across its many cores.

Adobe plans to implement multithreading into the AIR and Flash runtimes the second half of 2012.

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