i5-4460 or Fx 8350

Sorry that is a little too simplified for my liking to leave without a better description.

Hyperthreading works by having mid-process storage so to speak. A program is being worked on by the CPU, and it needs to load additional information frequently. In a normal CPU there is a delay waiting for the information so it pauses and waits for it, in a hyper threaded CPU, it instead moves the current task to a temporary holding area while the data is retrieved, and lets another task which already has the information it needs get pushed through instead. That way there is less time when the CPU is waiting between tasks giving better efficiency. It also lets some parts of the CPU that aren't being used by a task be used by other tasks to speed up work on additional task to further help performance.

The AMD CPUs is drastically different from this. Inside of every CPU there are several different parts, two of the most important parts are Integer Units and Floating point units. Typically these are done in equal ration,1:1, one Integer Unit and one Floating point unit per each CPU. AMD tried something different and put two integer units with every floating point unit, a 2:1 ratio, in what AMD calls a Module. To call it a core isn't exactly correct cause its more than just a single core. For example the two Integer Units can each do two completely different tasks at the same time, there are double the resources for doing work of this type. While in a Hyper threaded core this is not the case, and if the CPU is trying to work on two tasks that require the same resource, they must wait and be worked on one at a time. AMD does use a form of hyper-threading for their floating point units, but not in the integer units. A major problem with this is that running this additional hardware consumes a great deal more power which causes more heat and power consumption problems. While hyper threading uses very little power cause it doesn't really any additional hardware just a small cache.

The reason the Intel quad-core CPUs are so much better than the AMD 8-core CPUs is because architecture though. The performance of their Integer Units and Floating Point units and in general the rest of their hardware is just over all better and faster. The architecture is so much better that comparing what AMD demonstrates as a quad-core against what Intel shows a dual-core with hyper threading will in a lot of cases show the Intel CPU is better because of architecture.