Paul Acorn,
I second the comments by akamateau as regards the excellent workstation potential of Threadripper.
There have been a few good reasons for dual Xeons or Opterons over the year: increased number of PCIe lanes, ability to use two processors with fewer cores allowing higher clock speeds, higher total RAM capacity. We have eleven Xeon systems totaling 17 CPU's for those reasons. However, the latency in synchronizing the data streams between processors and redundancy of components: having to provide space for two sockets/processors/ CPU coolers, and sets of RAM slots. Plus, anyway, many important workstation programs- such as all of Adobe CS/CC and much of Autodesk, have had limited benefit from a lot of threads. Plus, the user having to pay for the duplicate pieces is a cost/performance ratio born of necessity rather than efficiency.
There is an upcoming Threadripper 1955X 10C / 20T @ 3.6/4.0, 44 PCIe, 125W that is especially tempting. Given the probable high single-thread performance for 3D modeling, the usefulness of 20 threads in CPU rendering, and the ability to overclock, that appears potentially to be a fantastic visualization workstation processor and should have good analytical/compute, and simulation possibilities. If it's under $700, I may well have one. My hope is that there will be roomy large format WS motherboards for that big socket.
This also represents welcome competition for the upcoming LGA2066 Xeon specification and pricing. There are some signs of some level of Intel embedded marketing ossification, with the downmarket nomenclature of "Gold" and Platinum", sounding as though these are 19th Century CPU's to be sold at Woolworths or time-share condo schemes. Also, in my view, Intel already made a serious error with the i7-7820X, which has an enticing specification of 8-cores and 3.6/4.3/4.5 clock sequence for $600, but purposely disabled PCIe lanes to support only 28. That means that many users will think twice as they count the number of GPU's that will can run at x16.
Thanks AMD; finally some sign of life in the workstation world.
BambiBoom