Thanks for that information...
Can it do anything other than mine currencies or would it be able to be modified to decrypt/encrypt anything using the SHA-256 hash?
FPGA - yes
ASIC - unlikely. sure answer after avalon releases chip specs. I would think these chips are highly optimized for mining only.
@antekh - why is that? Simply because a company won't be manufacturing any ASIC chips for this or because of some other restriction?
because scrypt needs lots of memory for each hash. going to and back from cheap DDR memory takes too long, and the memory closer to the chips are too less in most chips. Its a hard problem to solve since the scrypt algorithm was specifically designed to mitigate attacks from custom hardware.
read this :
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1305/what-features-of-scrypt-make-tenebrix-gpu-resistant