I would be very surprised if Ryzen goes for 32 cores, 24 is more probable. If they do go for that many cores, it will likely be "Zen 5C" cores, which may or may not be competitive with Threadripper being full Zen 4 cores.
Regardless, it's the memory channels and extra PCIE lanes that makes Threadripper shine, oh, and now HEDT gets Registered ECC which is fantastic.
> I would be very surprised if Ryzen goes for 32 cores, 24 is more probable.
The rumor is that the CCX is going from 8 to 16 cores, at which point a 24 core ryzen would necessarily be 2 partially-enabled CCXs. That wouldn't make much sense as their high end configuration which so far has always been 2 fully enabled compute chiplets. So if that 16 core CCX change is true then 32 full fat cores for the top end Ryzen is the most likely scenario. There wouldn't really be any reason for AMD to just refuse to put 2 fully enabled dies together, especially since as you noted Threadripper & Epyc already offer more benefits that Ryzen just won't get.
Regardless, it's the memory channels and extra PCIE lanes that makes Threadripper shine, oh, and now HEDT gets Registered ECC which is fantastic.