It makes perfect sense if you're an enterprise customer and your software dependencies charge you extremely different priced tiers for different maximum numbers

It makes perfect sense if you're an enterprise customer and your software dependencies charge you extremely different priced tiers for different maximum numbers of cores. AMD is selling a license-optimized part at a higher price because there will be plenty of demand for it. People who don't save a boatload by getting the license-optimized CPU will invariably choose to buy the 24-core one, which helps AMD by making it easier for them to keep up with the demand for the 16-core variant, and the 16-core variant gets an unusually nice profit margin. Win win. This is not the first time AMD or Intel have offered a weird inverse-pricing jump like this... I highly doubt it is a typo. My other comment reiterates some of these points a different way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26469182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26469182