Mythbusters Explains Parallel-Processing

Even though Nvidia’s Nvision tradeshow did not achieve its goal of 10,000 visitors, more than a thousand gathered at the Center for Performing Arts to witness the ending of the event. The duo behind the popular Mythbusters showed the results of six months of work, demonstrating the difference between a CPU and a GPU, following the conventional wisdom of parallel computing.

Dubbed Smiley and Mona Lisa, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman presented two robots that represented the difference between a CPU and a GPU. Smiley was given a task to draw a smiley using conventional CPU techniques, doing one thing at a time. Smiley was a relatively simple robot, while Mona Lisa consisted out of "1100 massively parallel barrel processors", dwarfing the 240 shaders offered by a GeForce GTX 280 chip.

Oh man image the... art... you could create with one of those. I would buy a truck to truck-mount one. Turret-based graffiti! The best thing is, with hardware like that, you could totally get permission to graffito-tag stuff. People would come and watch!

Huh, NVIDIA only got a thousand visitors for the event. Maybe people wouldn't come and watch. I suppose you could take one to Burning Man, and fill it with, now I'm just guessing here, paint and LSD and get quite the following.

[Read Full Story at TG Daily]

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1 User Comment

1 - Posted by Kurtis on August 31, 2008 - 1:56 pm

NVIDIA was promoting this event to press hardcore. I got probably upwards of 30 emails from people asking if we were going, to try to set up meetings with us. I thought to myself: "Hmmm... pay to fly myself out and stay in a hotel to be NVIDIA's marketing tool... or stay home and save my cash... tough decision."

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