Quote from: phk on April 19, 2013, 10:58:03 PM

Quote from: mr_random on April 19, 2013, 10:37:36 PM

This is good news as far as I am concerned, the whole point of Litecoin using Scrypt was so it would be difficult for specialised hardware to have a massive performance edge.

SCRYPT doesn't attempt to make it difficult for special hardware to have a performance edge. Instead, it tries to make it more expensive. Depending on RAM requires die area which translates directly to unit cost.

In the case of an ASIC, this is something to be considered. The 128KB used by litecoin translates to 1 million bits of SRAM, which might multiply the ASIC unit cost x2/x4/x10?.

In the case of an FPGA, you already bought the RAM. In the case of the popular Spartan 6 LX150 used in bitcoin mining, you already bought over 4 million bits worth.

So, whomever picked the 128KB size for litecoin didn't go out of their way to make it that hard for "special" hardware already in circulation.

So all they needed to do it ramp up the 128k number to make it cost-prohibitive on FPGAs for the next few years? That seems a fairly glaring oversight given their stated goal.