AFAIK Ivy will have FMA3 which will bump performance in various encoding apps and a few other things, but its not intended to do much more than replace Sandybridge, its a tick, or a tock, its 95% just a shrink of Sandy.
Think about it, you own the fab, and the time and pay the workers the same, wafer costs are roughly the same, do you make a wafer of 236mm2(or 216mm2, too many cores to keep track of the size exactly) or a wafer of, what I'm guessing will be around 150-160mm2 Ivy bridge, and get around 40% more cpu's off a wafer... all of which you can sell for the same cost........
Profits, a shrink makes more profit and the next tick, or tock to Haswell, after they've established a known architecture on 22nm, will be the big performance increase architecture.
Ivy is already fairly well known, its aiming for 5% IPC increase, and 5% higher clocks for 10% faster overall, why are we speculating, Intel have talked about it, they've officially told people what it will be. Assuming they hit targets for clock speeds which should be known at this point, I wouldn't expect them to miss any targets significantly.
77W, quad core, likely 3.5-3.6Ghz launching clock speed, Turbo I think unknown. its not half the size because the GPU is roughly going up 50-60% in size IIRC.
In terms of early ES benchmarks, impossible to know, if cache is designed to operate at X frequency it might suck at lower clock speeds, it might sync up and simply work better at the right frequency, think that 5% you can gain, sometimes more, by overclock a Phenom and also overclocking the northbridge, it can "unlock" performance. Intel also have a little habit of disabling features on ES Cpu's.
IF most of the 5% CPU IPC increase comes from FMA and other new instructions, you'll really only see that 5% increase some of the time.
The only question is, what price point it comes in at, do Intel make themselves more money, or bring a cheaper quad and cheaper HT enabled quad, say £120-£130 for the 3500k and £200 for a 3600k.
I wouldn't wait for Ivy over Sandy, at all, nor would Sandy or Ivy be a good upgrade from basically anything i5/i7 based of any generation, more than enough juice till Haswell(mid 2013 likely).
