UK software company Ekioh has unveiled Flow, a multithreaded HTML browser specifically designed for multi-core processors that claims to deliver a vastly improved user experience, with layout and animation performance said to be more than double the speed of other browsers on multi-core silicon.
The company says Flow is designed to overcome the performance issues of HTML UIs on multi-core processors, enabling products to meet consumers’ increasingly high expectations.
Flow claims to be able to harness the combined computing power of multi-core processors to deliver layout performance that scales with the number of available cores, giving a more responsive, smoother and faster UI experience, using a fine-grained, multithreaded architecture that aligns with the evolution path of multi-core silicon.
Flow also takes a different approach to rendering, by making full use of the GPU. Rather than painting on the CPU, Flow handles all rasterisation on the GPU, freeing up the CPU. The company says that these elements provide improved HTML performance without the need for content re-authoring.
In the TV space, the drive for ever higher-resolution UIs makes the multi-core issue more acute. Moving to Ultra HD user interfaces involves handling at least four times as many pixels as HD, which requires a significant increase in redraw and layout performance to achieve the same levels of responsiveness. This mirrors the challenges experienced in the shift from SD to HD where reportedly, Ekioh’s earlier solutions were rapidly adopted by middleware providers.
Flow joins Ekioh’s existing portfolio of WebKit and SVG browser technologies for the embedded marketplace, which the company says have already been deployed in tens of millions of products worldwide.
