In a move that could keep ties with online games programmers strong, Adobe Systems is adding 3D graphics support to a coming version of its widely used browser plug-in.

The move is an important advancement for Flash, a software foundation that eases programmers’ difficulties with incompatibilities among various operating systems and browsers. And it’ll come none too soon: Flash is under siege by a host of Web standards, and part of that work focuses on 3D Web graphics.

Adobe plans to detail new 3D abilities coming to Flash Player.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The 3D plans came to light on an agenda for the Adobe Max conference in October. “Join Sebastian Marketsmueller, Adobe Flash Player engineer, for a deep dive into the next-generation 3D API [application programming interface] coming in a future version of Flash Player,” said the agenda item for a talk titled “Flash Player 3D Future.”

The “deep dive” is on the last day of the conference, so it’s reasonable to expect the official news to arrive earlier–say, during the Monday keynote address on October 25.

Later, Flash Player product manager Imbert Thibault offered a bit more of a teaser in a blog post. “I tell you, some serious stuff is coming for 3D developers.

“If you are into 3D development for games, augmented reality, or just interactive stuff like Web sites, you just can’t miss the session,” Thibault said. When exactly the technology will arrive isn’t clear, but Thibault said it is coming “in a future version of the Flash Player.”

Adobe added some 3D features to the 2008 release of Flash Player 10, but they were limited–for example, 2D objects could be manipulated in a 3D space. It wasn’t a full 3D environment like that you’d see in a first-person shooter game or the Second Life virtual world.

And although Adobe invested a lot of time in the newly released Flash Player 10.1, much of that was getting the software to work on hardware-constrained smartphones, where Flash is largely nonexistent today. Because Flash’s interface didn’t change, the version number was only a minor bump upward.

Adding a 3D interface to Flash would be a significant change for programmers, so expect a full step up in release numbers. Version 11 sounds like the right time frame for 3D’s full arrival, given the significant effort under way by many players to rebuild Flash features without relying on Adobe’s proprietary (albeit publicly documented) technology.

Some of what Flash can do is being rebuilt with standards including HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language used to describe Web pages, CSS, the Cascading Style Sheets used for formatting, SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics technology, and JavaScript, the programming language of choice for Web applications. Examples of the new era coming in recent browsers include support for HTML’s 2D graphics technology called Canvas and CSS’s downloadable typeface technology called WOFF, or Web Open Font Format.

But the future of 3D on the Web is murkier. Major browsers, including Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari, are being fitted right now with 3D technology called WebGL. It’s based on an existing standard, OpenGL, that has wide if not universal support.

3D doesn’t end with WebGL. Google is using it as a foundation for library of code to provide a higher-level Web graphics 3D interface that began as a browser plug-in called O3D.

Here’s the rub, though: Internet Explorer. Although Microsoft is supporting a wide range of new standards in its forthcoming IE9, WebGL is not on the list.

“I think it’s different markup,” said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of IE, in an earlier interview, meaning that WebGL is antithetical to Microsoft’s current “same markup” marketing push that Web developers should be able to write code for one Web page that works compatibly under all browsers.

Flash sidesteps such browser compatibility issues by providing an interface.

However, it comes with its own baggage, such as the fact that Flash elements on a Web page often are isolated from other elements and behave differently. And Flash brings stability and security concerns, as Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs pointed out in a high-profile explanation of why Apple banned Flash from the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Online games are a major use of Flash, as sites such as Kongregate and Armor Game can attest and as Jobs acknowledged in his letter. Thus far, however, those Flash games tend to be casual affairs; the heavy-duty blockbusters are usually written to take advantage of an operating system’s native interface, such as Microsoft’s Direct3D.

Notably, Google is trying to marry this native approach with Web-based methods using its Native Client technology, which lets Web applications tap into a computer’s processing power.

While Flash isn’t likely at least in the near term to replace games that use the native operating system, getting 3D abilities would substantially expand the range of games developers could write, bringing new depth to those for racing cars or tossing wads of paper into a trash can, for example. Support for hardware acceleration would be essential for Flash 3D graphics, especially on mobile devices with limited processors and battery life.

It’s not clear which of these approaches or others will prevail, so Web developers will have to choose carefully which technology to use for new projects.

It’s clear that change is in the air. Scribd opted to move from Flash to HTML5 and other Web standards for its online document business. But despite Google’s ardent support for the Web standards, YouTube continues to rely on Flash as its primary vehicle for delivering video, and Google has built Flash directly into Chrome.

Adobe hasn’t said when the next version of Flash Player will arrive, but here’s one clue: Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch promised Flash will support Google’s VP8 video compression technology, and he promised that version would arrive within a year of the May release of VP8.

Another big item likely to arrive in the next Flash Player is 64-bit support. Here again, Adobe hasn’t been willing to commit to a time frame, but given that browsers are following the processor and operating system transitions from 32-bit to 64-bit, a release soon must be a priority.

Flash developers obviously have plenty on their plates. But one last thing: don’t assume that Adobe is betting on the Flash horse alone. It’s also getting more involved in the world of HTML and CSS.

At the same Max conference, another talk will focus on creating Web applications with HTML5 and CSS3. “Get up to speed on the latest developments in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS,” the agenda exhorts. “HTML5 has become a powerful way to add interactivity and video to the Web.”

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Atul Abraham instantwebmeetings.com at the DLD Stage via Seesmic

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One of the ongoing themes of my microprocessor coverage over the past few years has been the relationship between on-chip execution bandwidth and the “memory wall.” So I was intrigued to learn of new research from Sandia National Labs that indicates that the severity of the memory wall problem may be much greater than the industry generally anticipates.

In a nutshell, the “memory wall” problem is pretty straightforward, and it’s by no means new to the multicore era. The problem arises when the execution bandwidth (i.e., aggregate instructions per second, either per-thread or across multiple threads and programs) available in a single socket is constrained by the amount of memory bandwidth available to that socket. As execution bandwidth increases, either because clockspeeds get faster or because the die contains more cores, memory bandwidth has to increase in order to keep up.

To put this in simple multicore terms, cramming a ton of processor cores onto a single die does you no good if you can’t keep those cores fed with code and data.

But memory bandwidth isn’t keeping up. Memory bus bandwidth (latency and/or throughput) hasn’t increased quickly enough in proportion to Moore’s Law, a fact that leaves processors starving for bytes. In this respect, the “memory wall” is a classic producer/consumer problem, and it’s the reason that on-die cache sizes have ballooned in recent years. As the memory wall gets higher and higher, it takes more and more cache to get you over it. At this point, it would be fair to say that most modern server processors are really high-speed memories with some processor core stuck on the die, instead of vice versa.

The memory wall is therefore an added barrier to the success of the many-core paradigm. I say “added,” because the most famous barrier is the programming model. Massively multithreaded programming isn’t just a “hard problem”—rather, it’s a generation’s worth of Ph.D. dissertations that have yet to be written.

The work from the Sandia team, at least as it’s summarized in an IEEE Spectrum article that infuriatingly omits a link to the original research, seems to indicate that 8 cores is the point where the memory wall causes a fall-off in performance on certain types of science and engineering workloads (informatics, to be specific). At the 16-core mark, the performance is the same as it is for dual-core, and it drops off rapidly after that as you approach 64 cores.

The chart included in the report is striking, and I wish I had the appropriate background to interpret it. (Again, the lack of any link, DOI, report title, deck title, or other reference information is unbelievable.) Nonetheless, despite the lack of color from the source, I’m sure the many-core skeptics in the audience—and there are quite a few—will seize on it as further validation that the maximum worthwhile core count is well below 16.

It looks like Sandia is proposing that stacking memory chips on top of the processor is the solution to this bandwidth problem. If that is indeed their proposal, then they’re in good company. Both Intel and IBM have touted advances in chip-stacking techniques, and Sun has published research in the area of high-bandwidth memory interconnects that involve placing dice edge-to-edge. But, to my knowledge, these die-stacking schemes are further from down the road than the production of a mass-market processor with greater than 16 cores.

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Google Puts Tunes From YouTube a Click Away

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Does the world really need another Web browser?

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Google thinks so. Chrome, its new browser, was developed in secrecy and released to the world Tuesday. The Windows version is available for download now at google.com/chrome; the Mac and Linux versions will take a little longer.

Google argues that current Web browsers were designed eons ago, before so many of the developments that characterize today’s Web: video everywhere, scams and spyware, viruses that lurk even on legitimate sites, Web-based games and ambitious Web-based programs like Google’s own Docs word processor. As Google’s blog puts it, “We realized that the Web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser.”

What this early version of Chrome accomplishes isn’t quite that grand. But it is a first-rate beginning.

With no status bar, no menu bar and only a single toolbar (for bookmarks), Chrome is minimalist in the extreme.

Some might even call it stripped-down. This initial version is labeled “beta,” meaning it is still in testing. True, Google labels almost everything beta — four-year-old Gmail is still in beta — but this time it’s serious.

At the moment, for example, there’s no way to e-mail a Web page to someone, no full-screen mode, no way to magnify the page (rather than just the text), and no bookmarks organizing screen. Google says that these features are at the top of its to-do list.

Chrome is, nonetheless, full of really smart features that seem to have been inspired by other browsers — or ripped off from them, depending on your level of cynicism.

Take the address bar. As you start to type, a menu of suggestions appears immediately beneath — a list culled not just from pages you’ve visited before, but also from your bookmarks, search suggestions and popular Web pages that you haven’t yet visited. That works even the first time you try it, since Chrome auto-imports your bookmarks, history and even stored passwords from your old browser. (See also: the similar address bars in Firefox and Internet Explorer 8, also now in beta testing.)

If you’ve ever searched Amazon, eBay, nytimes.com or another popular site, another cool shortcut awaits. You can just type the site’s first letter in the address bar and then press Tab. Do that with “A,” for example, and the address bar changes to “Search amazon.com,” allowing you to search within that site without even going there first. You’ve saved one big step.

As your start-up page, Chrome displays pictures of nine mini-Web pages, representing your most frequently visited sites. (See also: the Opera browser’s Speed Dial feature.) This start-up page also lists several of your most recently visited sites and searches, making it a natural, time-saving starting point. (You can designate a more standard Home page if you prefer by clicking on the Options command that hides in one of the two menu icons.)

The “Create application shortcuts” command (also hiding in those menus) generates an icon on your desktop. When you click it, the corresponding site opens without the usual address bar and buttons — in other words, it now works exactly like a regular desktop program. For services like Gmail or blogging software, this feature further blurs the line between online and offline software.

Downloading files is really easy. A status button appears at the bottom of your browser window — there’s no Downloads window to get in your way. You click that button to open the downloaded file, without having to worry about what folder it wound up in.

If you believe Google, though, the best stuff is all under the hood. For example, Google chose, as the underlying Web-page processing software, the same existing “rendering engine” inside Apple’s Safari browser.

As a result, Chrome is quick — faster than Internet Explorer, although not quite as fast as Firefox or Safari. Since Chrome came out only Tuesday, I haven’t had time to test it on all 40 billion Web pages on the Internet (I gave up around dinnertime). Very few Web sites gave Chrome problems, though. NBCOlympics.com, for example, failed to recognize Chrome and therefore refused to play its videos, but that will change; nobody ignores Google these days.

Also under the hood are what Google considers some of Chrome’s most important features — the security enhancements. Google says that each tab runs in its own “sandbox,” so that if there’s nasty spyware-type software running on one Web site, it has no access to the rest of your computer, or even the other tabs. Google asserts that this is much stronger protection than Internet Explorer 8 gives you, especially in Windows XP. (Internet Explorer 8 supplies its best protection only in Windows Vista.)

Also in the security category: something called Incognito mode, in which no cookies, passwords or cache files are saved, and the browser’s History list records no trace of your activity. (See also: Safari, Internet Explorer 8.) Google cheerfully suggests that you can use Incognito mode “to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays,” but they’re not fooling anyone; the bloggers call it “porn mode.”

For more of the techie details about Chrome security, Google has created what may be the most innovative feature of all: an utterly charming comic book — yes, comic book — that explains the browser and its features.

Already, speculation is running rampant online. Will Chrome catch on? What about Google’s business relationships with its competitors?

And above all: what is Google up to?

Is it trying to build a platform for running the software of the future, thereby de-emphasizing Windows and other operating systems?

That’s a yes. Google even went to the trouble of rewriting Javascript, the programming language that underlies many such online programs. According to online Javascript speed tests, Google’s version is twice as fast as IE7’s.

Will Google ensure that its own services run better in Chrome than in other browsers? Is this part of Google’s great conspiracy?

That’s a no and a no. Chrome is open-source, meaning that its code is available to everyone for inspection or improvement — even to its rivals. That’s a huge, promising twist that ought to shut up the conspiracy theorists.

For now, it’s best to think of Chrome as exactly what it purports to be: a promising, modern, streamlined, nonbloated, very secure alternative to today’s browsers. You should do exactly what Microsoft, Apple and the Firefox folks will all be doing: try it out and keep your eye on it.

Because every now and then, Google’s fresh approach ends up dominating its once much bigger competitors (See also: AltaVista, Lycos, Ask …)

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Sure, we’ve seen some blurry videos and managed a few stolen glimpses when Andy Rubin demonstrated this beast, but now we’ve gotten our hands on a slew of pictures showing off a very real T-Mobile-branded Dream in all its Android-running glory. Not only does this confirm the design spied in those FCC docs as well as show off that nearly-done version of Android, but it seems to confirm the fact that this will be headed to T-Mobile, and sooner rather than later judging from the looks of the above device. Needless to say, our inner-geeks are completely geeking out right now. Hit the gallery below for a handful of other views of the phone.

[Thanks, Michael]

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