then perhaps orders-of-magnitude more electrically efficient, since the electric consumption will be primarily in the computation and not in the memory. And computation can be radically optimized on an ASIC.
As I predicted when I wrote in the Monero thread about this the other day, it appears the white paper didn't consider electricity as the most important factor. Duh.
The thing with memory hardened vs computationally bound is, on a card like an r9 290, you could get something like 175w power use for something not memory hardened (keccak), while on a memory hardened algo that's also obviously using lots of computation (any scrypt type derivative), power use would be through the roof at something like 250w+. GPUs seem very power inefficient in terms of dealing with memory configuration parlor tricks, so if they ever do get implemented in ASICs, the power consumption advantage is always enormous.