How does this relate to Intel and Havok?
Or, are you saying Intel's onto a winner?
Oh, you said 'like Havok'. I think I wasn't very clear atll, sorry; what I meant is that either Havok supports raytracing on all hardware that is capable of it in an efficient way, or it won't pick up. And when it comes to 'standard' Third Party solutions that'd work for Intel/NVIDIA/AMD, I am very skeptical that would be a good strategy.
Certainly Intel can use Havok and NVIDIA can use Ageia as 'backdoors' for graphics raytracing if they wanted to; however, unless they were nearly optimal for the other guy's hardware too (and AMD's ideally), I don't see how that can gain traction.
Suggestions for these hardware-specific aspects of ray tracing to be included in D3D welcome
Well, some would be in favour of a GPGPU aspect ala CUDA for future D3Ds, but as I said I'm skeptical that is the right direction for raytracing specifically. For some other things, of course, it is a very good idea.
How can D3D11 support features that "GPUs won't have"? Or are you suggesting that D3D11 will be built solely for Larrabee?
I'm not suggesting anything; just read all of Tom Forsyth's blog post and I think you'll see what I'm talking about. And indeed I'd be very curious about Tom's thoughts (or that of anyone else working on Larrabee - Matt?) on API issues and standardization. As I said, this problem isn't exclusively related to raytracing.
P.S.: I wrote a noticeable chunk of the original news piece, but the final version was written by consensus - so do not assume the views presented in the news piece are 100% exactly those of anyone specific on staff, although all of us agree with the vast vast majority of what's in the piece (and parts where that didn't happen were just removed, obviously).