BTW, in your article, the quoted correspondence says this:
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However, this is largely because we don't know many better ways to implement ray tracing than general-purpose hardware, not because of some intrinsic advantage of ray tracing over other methods on CPUs.
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I sure as hell hope Intel engineers don't also think that's true, because this is definitely fixed-function hardware:
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~woop/rpu/rpu.html
There was a more detailed paper on the RPU, and it was quite striking that the majority of the die was dedicated to shading (you know... that thing traditional GPUs do too!) and I did some basic calculations comparing the perf/mm² of of the raytracing part of the chip against the performance they gave for CELL (which didn't do shading), and needless to say, it was susbtantially more efficient. And that's just an university project, without custom logic or dynamic gating or anything else you'd see in CELL.
That doesn't mean the ALU part of future chips won't be very important, though. It'll arguably still be the most important part. But there will also imo remain a significant place for fixed-function units, and perhaps it would be wise to consider load-balancing between fixed-function units and programmable ALUs in some cases to improve efficiency. There is a nice but quite vague NVIDIA patent by Erik Lindholm on the subject for TMUs, btw. It's not hard to imagine that being extended to other systems.