It will be interesting to see how easy this Baikal N miner can be firmware upgraded since its FPGA, when Monero March 2018 Hard Fork happens.
Monero Team has already stated that they will not hesitate to fork if ASIC players manufactures XMR/Cryptonote miners.
Problem is; the scratchpad on the algo is ~2Mb.... all they need to do is increase the algo to the point where it takes too much processing AND memory; i think its a win win. It seems they designed this algo to scale up both issues at once if need be.
I would be interested to see how it looks after.... sure, you can add more memory to a future device, but increasing the computations on the scratchpad, will make it that much harder to compute...
This is my understanding as well, but one problem with increasing the scratchpad size to defeat ASICs is that it also reduces the hashrate of GPU/CPU miners; perhaps monotonically So that seems like a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot kind of solution.