I forsee a few things possibilities occuring. Bitmain going to coin devs and try partnership, or they will make a programmable asic. Those are called FPGAs? So, u fork away, the asic updates firmware and get the new algo working. They will still make normal asics on top of those programmable asics though because asics are far cheaper I believe. And I am guessing the devs work fork away this time because if they fork away, the programmable asic catches them anyways. Or perhaps make an asic for every algo to the point coins cant fork, if that is possible.
Bitmain can probably design their own FPGA and manufacture it cheaper at scale.
if they do programmable asic. that might be a winner to everyone and GPU might die till then there is no way ASIC is good for much of any thing but destroying everything it touches because you can't reuse ASIC the way it is .
I"m a ware of how firm ware updates work with FPGA IVE done it a few times with some Script miners that supported it that were beast for there time .