From what I've seen AMD's recent chips beat (sometimes outright destroy) Intel on multithreaded tasks, but on single-threaded tasks it's still a bit of a toss up and depends on the work load. Intel seems to still come out ahead on some heavy numeric and scientific type work loads, especially if vector instructions are used. The differences are not huge though, and AMD solidly wins on price/performance even in cases where it's a bit slower in absolute performance for single threaded work.

At this point Intel literally only makes sense if you have one of those single threaded work loads where it still excels and you absolutely must have the fastest single thread performance.