A public GPU miner is only going to add miners to YAC, which, in my opinion is a good thing. I have a few GPU rigs and ALL of them have the absolute worst, yet most power efficient CPU's - so, not viable for YAC mining. Now that I can point some of them at YACoin, I can get back in the game. I'm guessing it's the same for many. Also, as WM already mentioned, the performance difference isn't like any other scrypt implementations - so for those that have good CPU's, mining is also still viable for them.
I agree with this, especially since N is at a high enough level now so that GPU miners don't have THAT much of an advantage over CPU miners. I'm still solo-mining on my i7-2700k just fine.
Agree and disagree - I know there were people who were able to do their own OpenCL implementation and get them running ahead of one being publicly released.... However, the GPU in my laptop (7850M) is running at roughly 4x the rate of the CPU (i7 3610M) - that's quite a bit of an advantage!
In comparing YAC on GPU to BTC on GPU, It's looking to me that the newer cards (7xxx) do great at this algorithm, while older cards (5870, I'm looking at you), aren't so good, even though they may crush in BTC hashrate...
7850 -> 140 KH/sec YAC, 310 MH/sec BTC
5870 -> 100 KH/sec YAC, 400 MH/sec BTC