840-Barrel Paintball Machine

Heh, it's a V ad. Not sure if believable.

Whoa! Ryan, chill dude. This is not the place for parallel vs. fast timesharing discussion. That place would have been a bar in downtown Minneapolis in 1982 when I (IBM) sat next to a systems architect from Cray.

As for the video clip, I have so wanted to do this.

That isn't really the difference is it? Isn't it the difference between RISC and CISC architecture? Are GPUs real parallel processing circuits or do they just us thread handling, like CPUs, to time-share their resources?

From what I understand, the advantage of RISC over CISC is in it's computational speed, but CISC provides more flexibility which is why CISC is used for Central Processing Units and RISC is used for more specialied processing tasks, such as the North and South Bridge, the GPU and the chip inside your toaster.

Thread handling techniques differ from real parallelism in that with thread handling only one task is ever performed at the same time, much like the first robot operated by Adam and Jamie. Except that robot only has one task to perform, if it drew two pictures and shared it's processing time between them, that would reflect thread handling. Parallelism is an aspect of multiprocessor computers, but even that is a psuedo-parallelism as all the instructions must filter through a time-sharing processor first that allocates portions of the task to other processing units. Much like some networking protocols.

This is vastly different than the parallel processing which happens in the brain, which is more akin to the second robot in Adam and Jamie's presentation. I could be wrong though, it's been a while since I studied computer processing technologies.

Adam and Jamie from MythBusters did the same thing to illustrate the difference between CPUs and GPUs.

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