The improvement was accomplished by shifting more of the image processing from the computer's main processor (CPU) to the graphic processor (GPU.) This shift has been an ongoing trend with many graphics-intensive applications and was bound to happen with Flash eventually. But it's important to remember that the real goal is to reduce power consumption and heat overall -- not simply to transfer those issues to another component. Enhanced CPU performance matters little if the total power/heat profile remains high, with only a new metric of poor performance.
It also raises the question of how much these improvements will scale to mobile, where improvement is arguably the most important. Mobile devices don't generally have the kind of GPU horsepower available on the desktop. Failure to significantly improve power performance for mobile will continue to leave Flash effectively impaired for that critical market.
The new version is currently in beta but should be finalized with the coming 10.2 update. Ultimately we'll need to see benchmark data for the final release to know the full extent of power improvements, but for now we can be optimistic. Hopefully Adobe will also use this as an opportunity to make Flash Player more stable and secure. For many users, crashes and security patches both need to become far less frequent.
