Quote from: antekh on April 18, 2013, 05:22:07 PM

Quote from: LeroyB on April 18, 2013, 05:16:34 PM

@antekh - why is that? Simply because a company won't be manufacturing any ASIC chips for this or because of some other restriction?

scrypt and sha-256 are different algorithms and in short words: scrypt needs more resources (more and fast RAM) than currently available FPGAs or ASICs don't have.

You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt#Introduction also some more info here: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/16354/whats-the-advantage-of-using-pbkdf2-vs-sha256-to-generate-an-aes-encryption-key

What is interesting is, that when I shopped around, I found quite a lot of FPGA PCI board that although dang expensive, had ridiculous computing power and pretty heavy amounts of RAM. Some of them used for development or medical imaging.