One reason I chose to buy the lowest-end Threadripper instead of the highest end Ryzen. In the future, even if there's never any compatibility with socket sTR5, the parts in the same generation provide a part-by-part upgrade path up to 96 cores, 1TB of RAM (or was it 2TB? I forget), and 128 PCIe lanes.
That's going to certainly depend a lot on the tasks you do.
An embarrassingly parallel task would work better in the weak 96 cores than 4 strong cores unless those strong cores were literally 24 times more powerful, or if pegging 96 cores causes RAM to be a significant bottleneck.
