At this point though intel has slashed their price/core to be competitive if not better than threadripper. They don't have anything that compete in core count, but if you look at the 9980/10980 series with 18 cores, its very competitive on a price basis per core with the 24/32/64 core threadrippers. If you want max cores then you still need to go with threadripper but if 18 is enough, i don't get all the hate 10980 gets. There are certain linear algebra related workloads where the intels excel and why I would probably go with the 10980x were I to upgrade (which im probably not, 4 year old pc doing fine)