You are correct in assuming the turbo-boost will be higher for less active cores. This has always been the case for multi-core intel CPUs. For example, the Core i7 7820HQ in the high end 2017 15” has a base clock of 2.9Ghz and a maximum boost clock of 3.9Ghz; however, that maximum boost is only achievable on a single core. It will only turbo to 3.7Ghz on 2 active cores and 3.5Ghz for 4 active cores.
To more or less echo what the previous poster said... AMD GPUs are generally superior in OpenCL compute than their NVIDIA counterparts, and Final Cut makes use of OpenCL for GPU compute workloads. This is presumably the case so that Final Cut will work well with both AMD discrete cards as well as with the Intel integrated cards of the rest of Apple's laptop lineup. On the other hand, I believe Adobe Premier can take advantage of NVIDA CUDA acceleration for GPU compute - resulting in better performance in Premier for NVIDA cards.
This is a good question... none of the Kaby Lake H-series CPUs were paired with GT3e - to say nothing of GT4e. I think the Iris Pro brand was less than profitable for Intel because the 45 watt chips are generally paired with discrete graphics, as you said. Do we know that the Iris Pro brand will make a comeback in the 8th Generation Intel lineup?
Yes it can. And still for Example GTX 1070 can be slower than RX 480
I think Apple should build a mobile workstation class laptop in this spirit using a 17 inch retina display and chassis from pre-retina generation unibody. This will be a true mobile solution for professionals. It will include 2 TBs of SSD storage standard along with the option for two more if the user wants, totaling about 6 TBs. Because the chassis would support a larger battery, they could switch to DDR4 RAM, 32 GBs standard, nVidia Quadro graphics with 6 GBs of vRAM with configuration support for up to 16 GBs.
I'm sure I remember seeing Coffee Lake was meant to bring back the high end iGPUs to the H series chips, was it on one of those intel roadmap charts that show the succession over 3/4 years? Looking less likely now though so I'm either going to have to spend way more cash than I have to on a machine that's got far more power than I'll ever use, hope Apple introduces a larger screened 'macbook' further down the price scale, or take up serious video editing as a new profession!
Reasonably likely, eventually? Depends on how long you're willing to wait, I suppose. If Apple sticks to its historic ~8 month refresh then we should be seeing the next gen pros in early 2018, and quite possibly another refresh in late 2018 (dependent on Intel releasing appropriate 8th and 9th gen chips on time) equally, they could go back to a yearly cycle, and it'll be June before we even see the 8th gen chips in whatever form they take.
It could also be a phased in refresh. 13 inch MacBook Pro's first, then 15 inch MacBook Pro's in June. It would be such a long wait though. I think its reasonable enough to see updates by Early March 2018.
That does have precedent with the 2015s, though in that case they didn't end up updating the chips anyway for the 15". On that note, why they didn't subsequently bump it to broadwell, either in early 2016 (they had plenty of time to squeeze a whole generation in between mid '15 and late '16) or even quietly alongside the late 16s (again, this is precedented by the retina/ non retina 2012s) when they must have known it was staying around for another 2 years + seems odd.
