I was surprised to hear that the Threadripper series starts out with a 16 core variant. But it turns out Zen 4 based 7945WX had just 12 cores.
Considering Threadripper also act as “bridge” between Ryzen and Epyc, and having tremendous I/O (PCIe lanes, quad channel memory, and definitely PCIe connectors) it is possible that AMD just don’t want to waste some dies and sell them as is with reduced price. Same as like 5500GT ryzen which really weird being cut down 5600G without igpu and having less cache (than 5600) makes it slower than Ryzen 5 5500.
Other than that it kind of weird enough as if you can afford the Threadripper platform, you definitely can get the higher core count to feed your PCIe storages, the fast Ethernet interface and the quad channel memory.
