On the other hand with CPU mining, CPU's are complex and difficult to feed (you often won't find more than one on a motherboard) and the capital (CAPEX) versus power cost (OPEX) ratio is very high. You simply can't easily scale up to 100 computers (the equivalent of 1 asic hashboard) very easily. Especially when these large miners can't dominate the market, everyone with a laptop from angola to zimbabwe will be competing with them.
So I was looking at the prices of some dual-socket and quad-socket servers that also got some good memory inside them, and if you put a few of these together, you're staring at the price of an ASIC, but nowhere near it's performance.
It's all in the circuits. I'm not a hardware engineer or anything like that but the more stuff you can push to transistors directly, the more performance you'll get in any application.
And if you can't afford the short-time cost of accelerating a formula like that (likely because the problem will be irrelevant soon), then FPGAs are a nice alternative that gives you some flexibility in wiring it without sacrificing too much performance.