There is no such coin as ASIC resistant. It's just marketing , like the gold silver stuff some people cling.
So the creators of litecoin, use the scrypt agorithm, that is memory intensive and would be difficult and cost prohibitive to create an asic for hashing, however that is not asic resistant???
Nope... it is just cost prohibitive... fast memory is expensive... and the amount needed to be 50X+ faster than a GPU is staggering.
Consider the following...
BFL 30 GH/s (@ early pre-order) and a MrTeal 30+ GH/s ASIC using the same BFL chips is ~$700, and mines ~50X faster on SHA256d than a single Radeon 7950 @ ~$350.
That is 3GB of GDDR5. For scrypt mining, that 3GB of GDDR5 @ 1800MHz communicates on a 384 bit lane with the GPU core clocked to 1200MHz (my OCs... everyone's are different), nets about 700kh/s. If you separate the core but increase the memory size and speed, you can increase the kh/s. But, that is not the same as going from a GPU core to an SHA256d ASIC core style of hashing... the GPU core doesn't make the scrypt hashrate that much faster... it's all in the memory bandwidth. That means to match the scale of an entry level ASIC for SHA256D compared to a GPU when building for scrypt... your focus is increasing memory size, speed, and and the size of the pipe communicating with the processor.
Now imagine what it costs to put that 3GB of GDDR5 on a GPU... multiply it by 50... and then add even more moving from 384 bit lanes to something like 512 bit... or higher. Add that in with a custom processor to be optimized for handling scrypt, and you have yourself one expensive piece of First Gen hardware.
I would LOVE to own one... odds are not in my favor until this is proofed and prices drop in Second Gen.
