Hm, that is strange. It does not even tax my CPU enough to kick it out of its lowest speed state, let alone tax any of the cores.

That's because all the work here is being done through WebGL shaders. Your parent experienced a software fallback, I guess.

Intel announced a year or so ago they could JIT compile javascript and run it on their GPU. Maybe that's why?! If so, welcome to the bold new age of GPGPU and AMD's HSA... :)

Likewise, 5-7%, but I don't have a nice new machine like you do.

Core 2 Quad Q9950 and an nVidia Geforce 8800 GT 512MB.

That's interesting. What kind of CPU?

Intel 3930k:

http://i.imgur.com/OF58RZl.png

After the peaks when it is flat at around 3% is when it is playing.

You must be a better programmer than me.

If you write single threaded applications you cant go above 1 core and so will never hit this mark :)

fork disagrees.

As does pipe.

Rapidly cycling the processor affinity tries its best.

Say what?

It was weird timing because I was working on a multi-threaded application that was murdering my server (expected) when I made the comment.

Hmmm.... My 2.5Ghz Core2 Quad is sitting at 15-20%. Compared to watching the vid on youtube at 5-10% utilization.

I'm running an i5 processor, and when the video was playing my cores jumped from the 5-10% range (background stuff I've got running) to the 25-40% range.

Interestingly, just switching from the demo tab to this HN tab (FF 21 on Ubuntu) drops the cores to the 10% range. They jump again when I switch back.

LOL, my old core2 duo has both cpus running over 80% on Ubuntu with a GeForce GTX260. But when I click on another tab, with the video still playing on a non-visible tab in Chrome, the cpus drop to around 20%. When I click on the video tab again, the cpu ramps up to the 80% mark again. Neat trick.

That's the nice thing about requestAnimationFrame. It's smart enough to not waste time updating if you're not looking at it.

As for 80%, umm... video driver issues? :-(