Is there a particular application you're trying to run at the same speed as a Mac Pro? Westmere EP to Ivy Bridge is a bit of a per-clock differential, but you're still talking about 3x the cores. If your disk subsystem is already exceedingly excellent, and your sure that you're never going to need more than 32 gigs of ram, the Ivy Bridge chip will become the bottleneck on the way to "performance like a Mac Pro."
On the other hand, I think a lot of people who say they need a Mac Pro for performance reasons are going to be looking at the iMac and offerings from Dell/HP/Lenovo for a few months yet.
Re haswell: There are some *very* interesting "Crystal Well" i7 SKUs in the pipe at the moment. ark.intel.com says that they're released, and they're quads ranging from about 2.0 to 3.2GHz with Intel HD 5200 Pro IRIS or whatever the exact sequence of tags is. They don't have vpro or some of the newest VT extensions, but they're more than everything you'd need in a) a low end iMac for people who don't care about the ATi and nVidia names B) a high end mac mini for people who do care slightly more about graphics performance and c) other space-constrained form factors.
The Mac Pro will be exceedingly interesting (to me, personally, at least) again once it gets revved. I think at this point Apple's waiting for one or more Xeon platform refreshes. The E5s are at the Sandy Bridge microarch right now and the E7s are there or are on Westmere still.
On the other hand, I think a lot of people who say they need a Mac Pro for performance reasons are going to be looking at the iMac and offerings from Dell/HP/Lenovo for a few months yet.
Re haswell: There are some *very* interesting "Crystal Well" i7 SKUs in the pipe at the moment. ark.intel.com says that they're released, and they're quads ranging from about 2.0 to 3.2GHz with Intel HD 5200 Pro IRIS or whatever the exact sequence of tags is. They don't have vpro or some of the newest VT extensions, but they're more than everything you'd need in a) a low end iMac for people who don't care about the ATi and nVidia names B) a high end mac mini for people who do care slightly more about graphics performance and c) other space-constrained form factors.
The Mac Pro will be exceedingly interesting (to me, personally, at least) again once it gets revved. I think at this point Apple's waiting for one or more Xeon platform refreshes. The E5s are at the Sandy Bridge microarch right now and the E7s are there or are on Westmere still.