A few months ago, we announced at Max 2010 in Los Angeles, the introduction of the Molehill APIs in the Adobe Flash runtimes on mobile and desktop. For more infos check the “Molehill” page on Adobe Labs. I wanted to give you guys more details about Molehill, some more technical details on how it is going to work from an ActionScript developer standpoint.
So let's get started 
What is Molehill?
“Molehill’ is the codename for the set of 3D GPU accelerated APIs that will be exposed in ActionScript 3 in the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR. This will enable high-end 3D rendering inside the Adobe Flash Platform. Molehill will rely on DirectX9 on Windows, OpenGL 1.3 on MacOS and Linux. On mobile platforms like Android, Molehill will rely on OpenGL ES2. Technically, the Molehill APIs are truly 3D GPU programmable shader based, and will expose features that 3D developers have been looking for since a long time in Flash, like programmable vertex and fragment shaders, to enable things like vertex skinning on the GPU for bones animation but also native z-buffering, stencil color buffer, cube textures and more.
In terms of performance, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 today, renders thousands of non z-buffered triangles at approximately 30 Hz. With the new 3D APIs, developers can expect hundreds of thousands of z-buffered triangles to be rendered at HD resolution in full screen at around 60 Hz. Molehill will make it possible to deliver sophisticated 3D experiences across almost every computer and device connected to the Internet. To get an idea of how Molehill performs and see a live demo check this video.
The way it works.
The existing Flash Player 2.5D APIs that we introduced in Flash Player 10 are not deprecated, the Molehill APIs will offer a solution to advanced 3D rendering requiring full GPU acceleration. Depending on the project that you will be working on, you will decide which APIs you want to use [...]
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