I think it dpends on the PoW system used. On a basic level you have memory hardening, and that can be used to force usage of bulk memory on GPUs or bulk storage

I think it dpends on the PoW system used. On a basic level you have memory hardening, and that can be used to force usage of bulk memory on GPUs or bulk storage like with Chia. For the more complex PoW you can use speculative execution to make CPUs most performant like RandomX. With bitcoin its more arbitrary but you can see how they could hard-fork to a different hardware-favoring system if desired.