Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that strong AI could appear sooner than otherwise with faster hardware. This is because, the earliest algorithms for strong AI are likely to be flawed and imperfect. These imperfections can be compensated for by faster processing. Think of the earlier chess playing algorithms. Although Deep Blue was able to defeat Gary Kasparov, the algorithms themselves were relatively primitive compared to modern chess…
You make an excellent point about how early imperfections in the algorithms could be fixed as they evolve through feedback, and that this step-process running faster would get us the desired (evolved) algorithms quicker. But couldn't we accomplish this with distributed processing rather than faster hardware?
Later algorithms can be run on lesser hardware because they don't have to retread the same territory as their ancestors; they only have to search the space that hasn't already been examined. As the saying goes, they search "smarter, not harder".