[Disclaimer/Background: I work for Linzhi Shenzhen, a small independent privately funded ASIC startup in Shenzhen. We are working on an upcoming crypto chip whose first application will be Ethash, as announced at ETC Summit 2018 in Seoul. We are facing some delays, but all is fine. All things worth doing take longer than expected.]
In my view, @timolson did the Ethereum community a great - free - service with his series of posts and replies in this thread. Thank you Tim!
We at Linzhi are a little more open to speculating about the intentions or business deals that may have led to ProgPoW, which look very different from those behind RandomX. The anonymous nature of Mr. Else and Mr. Def as well as a number of surprisingly uniform accounts and articles/presentations are quite intriguing.
We don’t know the deals between Core Scientific (where Kristy-Leigh Minehan the main ProgPoW proponent is CTO) and Nvidia. We believe cost advantage leads to centralization
ProgPoW risks turning Ethereum into an Nvidia-managed game, with ETH devs becoming unpaid support staff to keep the game going.
I’m relaying the following quote from people with more GPU expertise than we have
or are willing to acquire (not from Linzhi, take it fwiw):
"On AMD V_MUL_LO_U32 uses 16 cycles, on Nvidia starting from Volta IMAD uses 5 cycles.
32-bit multiplication in ProgPoW was pushed under the pretense of it being inefficient on both manufacturers but that turns out to be a lie as on Nvidia it was only inefficient on Pascal. The algorithm is tuned to still let Pascal utilize full memory bandwidth due to simply sheer compute capacity difference coming partially from higher die size which is why comparing GPUs based on price is being pushed as of late. It’s not a secret that 4xx & 5xx series AMD GPUs are not high-end but because ProgPoW’s compute to memory bandwidth ratio is tuned to match Nvidia GPUs, AMD GPUs are not utilized to their fullest, most importantly losing the full memory bandwidth utilization which is the very basic foundation of the Ethash algorithm."
Is this true? If so would it leave much of the “honesty of the attempt” that @timolson sees?
Phil Daian wrote a great paper over a year ago
https://pdaian.com/blog/anti-asic-forks-considered-harmful/
There is another anonymous guy out there writing about ProgPoW, ether4life (no, it’s not us).
ASICs are designed and manufactured when there are buyers.
Currently there is sufficient demand if a machine can offer 150 days ROI (with flat/flat assumption, that is coin price flat, difficulty flat).
ETH currently pays out 3.6 mio USD / day or about 100 mio USD / month.
Without doing much math, it’s not hard to see how a system that pays out 100 mio USD / month can incentivize the design and development of chips. A lot can be done for a few million USD and it’s only natural that different businesses are competing for that money.
@fubuloubu - prepared or irregular PoW changes are a big incentive for secret mining. The alternative would be to pre-announce a PoW change one or two years in advance.
Quoting @timolson
“If GPU integer performance sucks very badly then ProgPoW may be worse than Ethash. If GPU’s perform pretty well at integers, then ProgPoW may be better. We’re not willing to speculate without a lot more work.”
+1 from Linzhi.
Tim made many other good points, I can tell you what I am doing: re-read his points, think. There are always new realizations to be had. What about the VLIW design? 
We are happy to have more discussions also in our Telegram group LinzhiCorp.