I'm perhaps behind the times when it comes to CPU shopping, but historically AMD has aimed for more cores at lower individual processing rates, whereas intel has aimed for fewer cores with individual processing rates being high.
Historically, if the process is hyperthreaded, AMD will typically beat out an Intel. Otherwise, Intel will beat out AMD.
Whether or not a calculation can be hyperthreaded will depend on the programmer being able to split the work between different "workers," though you also need to expend additional effort to coordinate those different workers.