In order not to give Nvidia too much breathing room, AMD has announced that the new Flash Player 10.1 beta will make use of ATI Stream technology for some neat hardware acceleration.

Hardware acceleration for Flash Player 10.1 beta will include both notebook and desktop platforms which run on Radeon HD 4000, 5700 and 5800 series graphics cards, Mobility Radeon HD 4000 and HD 3000 IGP, as well as bunch of FirePro cards starting from V3750 to V8750 and higher.

According to AMD, this will reduce CPU utilization and extend battery life for notebooks that are running on supported hardware.

Nvidia has already shown a neat preview of its ION platform with Flash Player 10.1 and it is certainly nice to have a GPU that can take off some load from the puny Intel Atom CPU.

You can find the Flash Player 10.1 beta here, and you can find the blog entry on this topic by AMD's Nigel Dessau here.