[fineman]

Well, yes - better hardware is a better choice. You're in a race with an attacker trying to reverse your password hashes.

You should feel safe in assuming that this algorithm will turn your CPU cycles spent into the highest attacker burden that any algorithm will. In this case, they're saying that they've used the new hardware features efficiently so they're able to increase the cost multiplier even more by doing harder work in the same time.

Just use whatever number will make it complete in a second, it's what you're gonna get.