NVIDIA hosted its first NVISION Visual Computing conference in San Jose Aug 25-27, 2008.  We were looking for a simple way to communicate what a GPU is to the 10,000 attendees.  In April, David Wright, Rob Csongor and I met with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (the Mythbusters) to see if they had any cool ideas.  Boy did they! 

They designed a set of paintball robots, Leonardo (CPU) and Leonardo 2.0 (GPU), to illustrate the difference.  Leonardo was plenty flexible and could mover around deftly but only had one barrel.  He painted a smiley face in about 15 seconds.  Leonardo 2.0 had a 1100 barrel array fed by four large air tanks that painted the Mona Lisa in 80 milliseconds.

Meeting in San Francisco, April 2008

After the event, August 27, 2008

Video on Youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKK933KK6Gg