Nope. The necessary Ivy Bridge-based Xeon E5 chips are not out yet, and
not due until mid-year.
There have been two extremely flawed "anaylses" floating around as to why Apple "needed" to wait for Ivy Bridge Xeon E5.
One was"thermal is much better so can be smaller". As I pointed out that is confirmed deeply flawed by all early evidence that is floating out on the specs. Ivy Bridge just runs faster over a generally broader dynamic range for single CPU package models and has a couple more cores in the top end dual package set-up. Everything there is exactly the same gap that Sandy Bridge has over the current models. There was and still is zero reason to wait on purpose for that.
Second set of arm waving was about how Ivy Bridge was necessary for USB 3.0 support. There is
zero USB 3.0 support in the CPUs. It was the mainstream chipsets that were coupled to the Ivy Bridge mainstream Core i offerings that have USB 3.0. For the Xeon E5 class of offerings Intel's historical process has to been to use the same support IO chipset for both of the tick/tock offering. That way avoid the long, protracted certification process with customers on that portion of the system. So Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge offerings will share the same chipset and likely the same motherboard. Just like Nehalem/Westmere did. It is normal and almost all other system vendors do the same thing.
The notion that Apple can solely relying on just Intel's USB 3.0 implementation is deeply flawed if Apple intends to bring USB 3.0 to Thunderbolt Docking stations (displays). Apple is going to have to support at least one discrete USB 3.0 controller because they need one in the detached peripheral. That same discrete controller could be used in the Mac Pro. There are some good reasons for skipping the initial generations of USB 3.0 controllers ( the NEC/Renasas ones don't do USB attached SCSI (UAS) and UAS protocol (UASP ) all that well. ).
Apple doesn't "have to" wait for a Xeon E5 chipset to support USB 3.0 is clearly evidence by the presence of USB 3.0 on all of HP/Dell/etc. workstations offerings in 2012.
The only sane reason to wait for Ivy Bridge is because the rest of the system isn't ready ( board and/or case design not done, etc. )
Wrong again.
It's a faster, more capable interface designed as an improvement upon the existing SATA interface.
I didn't say it wasn't a bit faster but it also isn't SATA "fourth generation". SATA 6Gbps ( 3rd generation) just came out in 2009. SATA and SAS are somewhat merging. When SAS moves to 12Gb/s (SAS 3.0 expected in 2013 ) then SATA 12Gb/s will like appear shortly after.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/LSI-SAS-SATA-12-gbs-pcie,14049.html
http://www.lsi.com/about/newsroom/Pages/20130322pr.aspx
The adoption is being slowed by two factors. One, pragmatically want PCI-e v3.0 slots to plug these 12Gb/s raid controllers into so don't have to use a relatively large number of PCI-e lanes. Second, putting SATA 6Gb/s controller(s) on a PCI-e card is pretty effective even without a new standard. (e.g.
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempossd.html or
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID )
There is little to now competitive speed advantage SATA Express has over these solutions when they are using a sufficiently fast SATA-to-PCI-e controller and x4 (or better) PCI-e v2.0 lanes. As SATA Express is limited to just x2 there is no bandwidth advantage. There may be some cost advantaged to collapsing PCI-e/SATA/low level device interface into one controller but that is going to take a while to realize.
Besides as with the general SAS moves then SATA relationship there is one with the connectors also.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6294/breaking-the-sata-barrier-sata-express-and-sff8639-connectors
It may be nice for a Haswell Xeon E5 to merge in with either SATA Express or SFF8639 but for now since the Mac Pro is at least a year overdue for a real upgrade it is extremely dubious to hold it back now for such a card. They aren't very prevalent at all in current deployments.
You're right - I had some improper information. The chips i was referring to are Redwood Ridge, but are not "Thunderbolt 2.0." I've updated that section to clarify.
While Apple's new motherboard is probably largely fixed until Haswell Xeon rolls around ( 2015? ) it isn't going to make much of a difference if a large enough portion of the Mac Pro user base is gone. Due to product neglect. The current Catus Ridge Controllers would work fine. The Mac Pro hardly needs the extremely low voltage idle power draw the Redwood Ridge bring. The 1.2 Redriver support is nice but very dubious if going to have 1-2 x16 PCI-e slots for video cards. Those cards can easily provision a Mac Pro with DisplayPort 1.2 support for those that need it soon.
Trying to make the Thunderbolt video output of a Mac Pro competitive with what discrete PCI-e cards can do over the next two years is extremely dubious. It likely will never be as flexible or advance or as high performance. Mac Pro primarily covers top end video with the PCI-e slots; not Thunderbolt. Trying to do otherwise is purely a bozo move.
Waiting for large Retina displays could help drive Apple's sales for such a product.
Retina 15" MBP blew away the 17" MBP. Retina for the discrete displays is far more likely a net decrease in display size. Not enable the larger diagonal ones.
For now those smaller and much denser displays are too expensive to be viable. The new TB display/docking-station will likely look just like the current 27" iMac. There no good indicators that the iMacs are going retina this year either. So there are no drivers for this to trickle down to a Mac Pro.
It's all about context. Tim Cook's comment was in response to a question about the Mac Pro. As such, the "pro product" mentioned is almost certainly something along those lines.
Not "along those lines", but about the Mac Pro. Remember the company's standing policy is not to talk about future products. His hints
have to tip-toe around speaking directly about the Mac Pro. The vagueness is primarily present to try to be in compilance with the poilcy; period.
There is little to no motivation for the bogeyman spector that folks trot out about how is "has to mean" that the product is being dumped. If Cook is asked about a Mac Pro and responds "next year doing something" then likely talking about a Mac Pro..... not some huge shift in strategy. Frankly, the huge shift in strategy is extremely likely that they are building a Mac Pro at all!
The Occam's Razor analysis about the delay for the Mac Pro is simply because they stopped working on it. If there was no R&D then there would be no new Mac Pro. There is no technological boogeyman holding back the release; Apple just stopped.
It's now to the point of being more embarrassing than uplifting me thinks. 
