I thought so too. But when I looked into typical software engineering workloads, I found that i9-7900x soundly beats the 16-core Threadripper in nearly all comp

I thought so too. But when I looked into typical software engineering workloads, I found that i9-7900x soundly beats the 16-core Threadripper in nearly all compiling/linking/running tests workloads because of the 20% per-core advantage. It also ended up being cheaper because x299 motherboards cost less.