From the rumors I have been reading, this will be a very high end processor with a very high end price tag. I wonder if it would just be cheaper to build two Ryzen 1700 based systems.

I plan on building a Ryzen 1700 system later this fall, unless of course something better happens to show up before I start my purchasing. I am hoping the release of this threadripper, in addition to a possible new Intel lineup, will drive pricing down on current selections.

I built a I7 5820K,
that's getting beat by the RYZEN 1600 and up.
So if THREADRIPPER can hold it's own based on number of cores,
I'd pay $600 for it.
The 5820 was like 450 or so.

Any more information on this monster chip yet?

Latest news as of today: http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-19...formance-benchmarks-leak/

You're welcome! :)
I am also looking into building a Threadripper monster (for WCG).
Already have 64GBs of 3466Mhz Quad Channel RAM, 1TB Samsung 960 Evo M.2 SSD and a 650W Seasonic platinum PSU waiting for that 16 core beast.

Despite the multi-core numbers in that link above, I am pretty sure that for the parallel nature of WCG...it will be both better and quite more affordable than the Intel i9-7900X 10-core counterpart.

Yeah...luckily I didn't mean the comments :)
There are also new leaked performance numbers on that same site now. The threadripper gets a bit higher scores this time.