How will a i3 Haswell, for instance 4370 compare to something like a E3-1225 or 1230?
Here is a link that compares both against. Intel Core i3-4370 vs. Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3
The main goal would be things such as;
double of cpu cores for the Xeon
Turbo modus on all cpu cores for the Xeon
internal L2 + L3 cache is double for the Xeon
Also for QuickAssist, I couldn't find any concrete information on what CPU has support for it.
In you initial post you were asking for two mainly things, that must or should be given, AES-NI and ECC RAM
and the QuickAssist Technology is one point on top of this, but not really inserted to pfSense at this time.
They are working on as I am informed, later it could be a little features that comes on top of all units that
are sold by the pfSense shop or has it plain integrated. It will be speeding up such things as crypto work,
compression workload.
I can't answer your Xeon question, but the only platform that directly supports quick assist is
the C2xx8 platform.
In the most new Intel CPUs AES-NI is working in and in some rarely cases also QuickAssist is
enabled also, but the most benefit from this Technology would be pointed to the "smaller" SoC
based platforms, but not only! There are two QuickAssist accelerator cards made by Intel.
Intel QuickAssist Technology
And on the bottom line of the pfSense shop offerings you would be able to rad the following
statement about it:
Future pfSense distributions will have support for QuickAssist. AES-NI support is included.
So I really thing it would be more important as we all can imagine at this point of time.
A SG-2440 or SG-4860 could also matching your needs and fitting your wishes.
But to answer this really you should tell us more about this point. ;)