The Proof of Work is a modified Momentum based algorithm. It has a small SHA512 component, and a large AES component - chips with AES-NI instruction sets will fare *much* better. Each hash requires 1GB of Memory to perform and encrypts 50GB of data. By contrast, the verification only requires 128K and less than one 10th of a second.
Here's how Cuckoo Cycle at 2^{28} nodes compares:
It has the tiniest possible SHA256 component (one call), and a moderate siphash-2-4 component.
Each instance requires 1GB of memory to perform and hashes 1GB of data.
By contrast, the verification only requires 1/3 KB and takes less than one 10th of a *micro* second.
Each instance has about a 5% probability of having a solution at the default setting.
Memory access in Cuckoo is maximally random, so it's constrained by memory latency
rather than bandwidth, and caches are irrelevant. The amount of computation is minimized
relative to memory access. See
https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo for a paper and implementation.