Blender 2.8 Eevee is reducing rendering by factor of 100, with a modest reduction of quality. It's basically using game rendering techniques, but instead of catering to realtime, it'll take a couple seconds to produce a frame. It's almost entirely GPU driven, so in the future there may not be a need to really go full Threadripper unless you use Cycles daily.

If you want to use Cycles for animations, you'll probably need the full Threadripper.

Cycles is easily 5+ minutes a frame, maybe 20+ minutes on a threadripper if you have an interior scene or something hard to light. Even with Cycle's denoiser, you need a lot of rays to get a decent animation.

Even a short 10-second animation through Cycles will take multiple days to render on a Threadripper.