It will be interesting to see how they perform compared to Sandybridge-E as they are launching a few months apart.
Significantly slower, significantly cheaper, Sandy -e will be 8/6 core chips(its unclear if there will be quad core chips, but quad channel memory, full 16x slots for sli/xfire is simply a waste for a quad core), Ivy bridge is dual/quad core, supposedly 20% faster than Sandybridge, though that could be averaged out with a 50% bigger gpu part(as in 50% more cores in it) could offset that so its almost the same cpu but with cpu benchmarks as they were, and gpu benchmarks 40% faster, average will be 20% faster. Or it could just be 20% faster due to 20% higher clock speeds, no one really knows yet.
In other words, it would seem a quad core Ivy wouldn't match a theoretical 5 core Sandybridge.... as Sandybridge-e is 8 cores, Ivy isn't going to touch it.
Haswell is the next really interesting Intel platform, octo cores in the mainstream segment, though I assume it will depend on Bulldozer and potentially how many cores 2nd gen Bulldozers have as to if they will be priced around say a 2600k, or way higher, hopefully we'll be seeing octo cores(with improve architecture on top) in the 2500-2600k price bracket.
Haven't actually seen info on it but I am assuming we'll see 22nm 8 core Ivybridge based chips on the high end platform before Haswell launches(late 2012/early 2013).
