For the most part. I wouldn't expect any significant change in prices or performance differences for most OSX apps, except (1) the Haswell 4-core may either be a tad slower (E5-1620) or a tad more expensive (E5-1630); the 8-core Haswell (E5-1680) might be a tad faster;
....
Here are CPU-World's listing of some introductory prices. ...
Xeon E5-1620 v3 4 / 8 3.5 GHz 10 MB 140 Watt - $294 vs. v2 (4 cores/3.7 GHz/10MB/130W - $294)
Xeon E5-1630 v3 4 / 8 3.7 GHz 10 MB 140 Watt - $372 vs. v2 (None)
Xeon E5-1650 v3 6 / 12 3.5 GHz 15 MB 140 Watt - $583 vs. v2 (6 cores/3.5 GHz/12MB/130W - $583)
Xeon E5-1660 v3 8 / 16 3.0 GHz 20 MB 140 Watt - $1080 vs. v2 (6 cores/3.7 GHz/15MB/130W - $1080)
Xeon E5-1680 v3 8 / 16 3.2 GHz 20 MB 140 Watt - $1723 vs. v2 (8 cores/3.0 GHz/25MB/130W - $1723)
Xeon E5-2697 v3 14/28 2.6 GHz 35 MB 145 Watt - $2702 vs. v2 (12 cores/2.7 GHz/30MB/130W - $2614)
The 1620-1630 being potentially slower looks more like a factor of Intel having no competition than some technological flaw in Haswell. The 4 core models look to simply be kneecapped on Turbo. Lower turbo rates on 4 & 6 v3 core models than v2 ? Smacks of using the IPC improvements to be offset by clock reduction to keep performance the same. Most likely while the TDP cap hasn't moved ( jump by merging voltage regulation in ... that's is just a system TDP ballon squeeze) they will probably generally operate even lower than before for same (or better ) performance.
TDP across a range of plug-in compatible models makes for one design to fit multiple configurations. It isn't that every one of those configurations run at the exactly the same temperature.
compare ______ base/turbo(average) drop [ if 10% IPC improvement with v3 ]
1620 v3 to v2 _____ 3.5/3.6(3.55) <- 3.7/3.9(3.8) [ -6.6% drop in average. stlll up 3.4% with 10% bump]
1630 v3 -- 1620 v2 3.7/3.8(3.6) <- 3.7/3.9(3.8) [ -5.2% drop in avg. still up 4.8% on bump ]
1650 v3 -- 1660 v2 3.5/3.8(3.65) <- 3.7/4.0(3.85) [ -5.2% drop in avg still up 4.8% on bump ]
1660 v3 -- 1680 v2 3/3.5(3.25) <- 3/3.9(3.45) [ -5.8% drop in avg still up 4.2% on bump]
1680v3 -- 1680 v2 3.2/3.8(3.5) <- 3/3.9(3.45) [ -1.4% drop in avg still up 8.6% on bump ]
For 4 core Intel set the base even lower and split range with two products at different price points. A 100Mhz wide base-turbo zone seems more indicative of market segmentation than of technology. 6 core narrowed to just one model at about the performance top end on mixed workloads. Almost zero competitive pressure from AMD and milking the margins. v4 (Broadwell) isn't going to particularly make that any different.
Sales prices are, however, usually a tad higher than introductory pricing until a year or two passes.
What Apple is paying for their volume purchase contract is not what these are but Intel's standard pricing is far more useful when comparing across generations and what Apple's price targets are that likely aren't changing across generation.
Pricing that sags over time because of bloated inventory are highly unlikely to impact Apple at all since they are highly likely not going to keep bloated inventory long term.
Second Thought - Apple would not risk being banned if it offered the following options:
The likely approximately 30% "apple tax" is going to put those is the "I have money to throw away zone". If Apple does the round-robin memory allocation (to even out NUMA hiccups but tax everything with the overhead) and non-OS aware resource allocation, that is alot of money for something that the firmware/OS/infrastructure is going to partially piss away.
I'm sure there would be some buyers who are just purely chasing corer counts but "max core count" isn't effective if don't match up infrastructure to support it.
----------
They could take the opportunity of a refresh to make a 4C entry-level for $2499 or so.
Only if they gutted the GPUs. The CPU costs are about the same. Memory costs are incrementally up. SSD and chipset costs are probably roughly the same. Where is this the ~$380 in hardware+software component savings coming from??? Discrete USB 3.0 chip is at most $10-25. That's an order of magnitude off.
Frankly the $2999 price only came with gimped VRAM ( only 2GB versus W7000's 4GB ) and RAM ( only 12GB DDR3 ).
Similar with making 6 core minimal entry point. The extra $200+ cost from from other components is coming from where?
