On a Quad-core AMD, Win7, Java 1.6.0_25, Processing 1.5, such sketch uses around 10 % of CPU.
I profiled with JVisualVM:

Unsurprisingly, it appears that most of the time is spent in the paint() section of PApplet, and PGraphicsJava2D's endDraw() -- both draw an offscreen image to the window (the gray background). Maybe there is a redundancy there (I see in the comments that 0194 added synchronization to avoid flickering, it can also be a cause of slow down, potentially -- to confirm).
Interesting too, I see that some time is spent in RegistredMethods.handle().
Looking at the code, I see a new empty array of Objects is created on each call, probably on each frame. I think it would be more efficient here to allocate statically the array and reuse it, instead of creating garbage (Processing avoids, in general, creating itself new objects as much as possible). Obviously it won't speed up much sketches, but it can't hurt, and everything helps... (and it is a reasonable, not obscure, optimization).