The point is just to utilize the commodity hardware to the max. Commodity hardware gives you a lot of memory IO for the buck. You can't spend the same dollars a

The point is just to utilize the commodity hardware to the max. Commodity hardware gives you a lot of memory IO for the buck. You can't spend the same dollars and get 100x more IO. But you can spend the same dollars and get 100x (or more) faster at typical hashes like SHA256. Scrypt uses memory IO so that you can get "your money's worth" by running on an Intel CPU.