Faster with 2x more cores and twice more power consumption. Hardly a win in my book - it means each core is way weaker and power hungry. Intel will easily match that sometimes soon without sweating.
Tom's Hardware saw a stock 2990WX at a lower power consumption than a stock i9-7980XE during a Prime95 "torture loop". Overclocked, the AMD part was higher than the Intel one, but only slightly.
Where have you seen that it has double the power consumption? Under what workloads?
Personally, I don't care about "weaker cores". If a system has 2048 cores clocked at 7 THz and it is 20% faster at my workload than a single-core CPU at 700 MHz, it is faster.
The fact that the "weaker cored" system is cheaper than the "burly muscly" single core system is a bonus.
Power consumption doesn't even matter that much either. It is the equivalent to a single 60W light bulb (or several of those new-fangled LED bulbs). Big whoop.
If I were Pixar and was running one of these 24/7 then, well, it's theoretically possible that the extra you pay in electricity would make up for the lower capital price. But for a hobbyist running this at most 10 hours a week I really doubt that that's a consideration.
But more importantly, The Tech Report looked at task energy for the Threadripper in rendering tasks and found that it took less energy to finish a render than competitorys. It's power was higher but the time was shorter to an even greater extent.
2x core count hardly ever offers anywhere near a 100% performance gain, even across Intel's lineup [1]. Very few workloads are that parallelizeable, and almost everything (from the program to the OS to the CPU itself) introduces some form of overhead when running in parallel.