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AMD's Senior Product Manager, James Prior, has clarified that Threadripper’s two extra dies have "no path to operation," dashing all those rumors that extra cores could be unlockable. Prior also says that AMD decided to use the term "dummy" instead of "inactive" to describe Threadripper's additional dies, as there is no way of utilizing/activating these additional CPU dies.
...higher core counts for Threadripper would offer some huge engineering challenges and downsides for the platform, especially when it came to power consumption and clock speeds on X399. Beyond that, there are factors to consider like memory latency for cores on any additional dies, as dies 3+4 (if the even could be used) would need to access memory through another CPU die, adding a lot of memory latencies to additional CPU cores. This may not be a huge deal for some workloads, but it is not exactly a negligible factor. At least all of the dies on EPYC have direct access to some of the system's memory channels.
...higher core counts for Threadripper would offer some huge engineering challenges and downsides for the platform, especially when it came to power consumption and clock speeds on X399. Beyond that, there are factors to consider like memory latency for cores on any additional dies, as dies 3+4 (if the even could be used) would need to access memory through another CPU die, adding a lot of memory latencies to additional CPU cores. This may not be a huge deal for some workloads, but it is not exactly a negligible factor. At least all of the dies on EPYC have direct access to some of the system's memory channels.
