San Jose (CA) – 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. These 1100 "shaders" painted a picture of Mona Lisa in a matter of a few hundreds of a second, resulting in lots of stunned faces, laughter and a big round of applause for the Mythbusters crew.

We won't dwell into the specs of these two, but Mona Lisa's fill-rate is quite interesting: 1100 (paintball) balls travelled eight feet onto wood-enforced canvas in just in just 275 ms, creating a picture of Mona Lisa within three quarters of a second.

We guess you could say Nvision ended with a bang (sorry, we couldn’t resist.) There was no information if and when these barrel processors will be available for sale.

A real hooten-nannie

Aug 28, 2008 20:44     

I wish I was there to see this. It would have been so cool to see BSG's "6" and these guys. I bet Adam was really laughing at the spectators when he was pushing his pixels!
Quasar report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Congratulations, you somehow manaed to totally not ...

Aug 29, 2008 03:38     

Congratulations, you somehow manaed to totally not take a picture of the finished result. Excellent journalism.
Jon Grant report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +19

cop car

Aug 29, 2008 05:12     

did you really look at the cop car in the movie? it had leaf springs not coil if you are going to do a test do it the same way. try it again. rd
rd report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -1

Video?

Aug 29, 2008 11:55     

Anyone have a link to a video of this?
nobody report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

What new GeForce?

Aug 29, 2008 12:16     

Am I the only one who really can't find anything related to the "new GeForce" in this article, except the title? And, is Mona Lisa the codename, or just the name of the robot?
HH report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

And you wonder why nVidia cards cost so much...

Aug 29, 2008 14:02     

Expensive advertising. As a consumer, you should feel used.
Narg report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

really cool

Aug 29, 2008 14:51     

That is really cool. When will one be available to the rest of us? :-D
TomLeeM/BigWarpGuy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Here is the video

Aug 29, 2008 17:16     

If you can not get enough of Jamie and Adam, here is the full version of their presentation at NVISION 08. It runs about 15 minutes and you will see exactly want the audience saw. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3OGgBkRiQ
Davie report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Video Link

Aug 29, 2008 17:17     

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3OGgBkRiQ
Dave report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Celebrity Ads

Aug 29, 2008 18:03     

Microsoft wastes millions and gets Jerry Seinfeld. Nvidia wastes million and gets the Mythbusters. AMD . . . cant afford advertising at the moment. :P
fanboy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

RE: Congratulations, you somehow manaed to totally not

Aug 29, 2008 19:54     

Sadly, the gallery contained 12 pictures. Don't ask why all pictures are not in the gallery, because I don't know. Theo
Theo@TG Daily report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Hmmm

Sep 05, 2008 18:48     

Well, it is true that they didn't actually get the theory of working totally right, the idea itself is awesome and cool.. I am gonna go rob a bank, so I can buy this thing and paint my Boss with it.... P.S. I'll need to re-align the P.B.guns so they spray "Whose your daddy?" on my Boss
Adithya report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0