For people who weren’t looking for a developer workstation back then: Threadripper suddenly brought the performance of a xeon workstation costing more than 20k for just a bit over 2k.
That suddenly wasn’t a “should I really invest that much money” situation, but a “I’d be stupid not to, productivity increase will pay for that over the next month or so”
It’s not just cores - it is higher performance per rack unit while keeping power consumption and cooling needs the same.
That allows rack performance upgrades without expensive DC upgrades - and AMD has been killing dual and quad socket systems from intel with single and dual core epycs since launch now. Their 128 core one has a bit too high TDP, but just a bit lower core count and you can still run it in a rack configured for power and cooling needs from over a decade ago.
Granite rapids has too high TDP for that - you either go upgrade your DC, or lower performance per rack unit.