Agreed. Those are only the i7's, but the way he keeps going on (in this and other threads) he thinks that Haswell's won't end up in the Mini at all and that they will skip directly to Broadwell.
There is a decent chance that Broadwell might bring the return of discrete graphics. If "no Mac mini is worth buying without a discrete GPU" then yeah... they'll "skip" Haswell.
If they can get rid of the IOHUB chip completely without gimping what is currently on CPU die then that would free up space. Coupled with higher VRAM densities at more affordable prices they might be to squeeze in a GPU+VRAM with the new overall system TDP budget without loosing a 2.5" drive sled position.
The Haswell SoC ( CPU+GPU+IOHUB) implementations are aimed at MBA like constraints which are too much for a Mac mini to sacrifice in order to be competitive.
Somehow he has come to the conclusion that the only way to reduce power usage is die shrinks and since there isn't a die shrink with Haswell
There is a reduction because power gating is better in Haswell. Plus Haswell probably only works on the 22nm process. The ivy bridge "shrink" was not optimized for the new 3d transistor process. It was good-very good shrink just not designed explicitly for it.
and they are increasing the GPU that the TDP will go crazy.
GT3 chips are very likely to just be bigger and therefore more expensive.
You can increase the number of GPU cores easily if will to just let the whole CPU die get bigger. ( same thing with going from 4 to 8 cores in the Xeon E5 class offerings. Just a bigger die with a 4 more core+cache layers squeezed in the "middle") with 99% of the two variants sharing the same logic design. Intel just charges more; get more, pay more.
Intel's margins might shrink slightly but, since AMD is still getting their act together, whatever the cost increase is Intel can just pass the vast majority of that cost increase off onto the customers.
Which based on the current known processors, TDP is only slated to increase 2TDP on the highest end models which the Mini should be able to handle (pretty sure the Mid-2011 + Discrete GPU would have had a higher TDP than 47).
The heatpipe may need some tweaks but nothing major. However, the more the significant thermal producers are directly attached to the heatpipe the better. Since in that config, heat can be transferred to the mini's edge and blown directly out of the box. Lots of different things that generate heat spread all over the motherboard is actually harder to deal with given the mini's phsyical space constraints and somewhat limited and very twisted air ingest-expel path.
