some haswells to have eDRAM

years ago, as far back as the P4, i remember reading an interview with an intel engineer that said intel was working on replacing using dram in it's cpu caches instead of sram and the engineer said that such a change would increase performance 10 fold.

fast forward how many years now and leaked intel documents suggest that some haswells, the ones that will be soldered onto the the motherboard primarily aimed for oem use, will have 128mb of eDRAM that's acts as a L4 cache and said cache looks to be available to both cpu and gpu execution units:

http://anandtech.com/show/6911/intels-return-to-the-dram-business-haswell-gt3e-to-inte...te-128mb-edram

my thinking is that this is intel's way of weaning consumers away from traditional FPGA; if "normal" haswells are only 10% faster than IB's and solder-on haswells are say 25% thanks to eDRAM L4 then they become a very attractive choice and it conditions consumers to accept BGA more easily when next generation cpu's come out.

one would have to expect that at some point in the future the entire cpu cache stack will be eDRAM, maybe even doing away with the traditional cache hierarchy and instead having one massive eDRAM cache, say 512 or 1024 megabytes.