I base my speculation on this comparison: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36412/what-is-the-difference-in-speed-between-a-gpu-and-an-asic-per-dollar-

I base my speculation on this comparison: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36412/what-is-the-difference-in-speed-between-a-gpu-and-an-asic-per-dollar-of-cost http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36412/what-is-the... between GPU and ASIC bitcoin mining and on https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis... for GPU and CPU comparison. From this the difference between between GPU and ASIC solution is about 10^4. Google tested against Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1650 single core, so it would be roughly 10^3 slower than GPU. So one could say that ASIC solution for bitcoin mining is about 10^7 times faster than single core CPU solution. So in this sense parents claim checks out. Now I do not know if it is possible to generalize these finding to the problem in question.