Sure, but that's them having a competent (well, less incompetent) ISA and microarchitecture; that they've made better use of the transistors available, not that they've achieved better feature density than what would be expected from where they are on the Moores law curve.

Also Intel and AMD have not delivered higher performance via more cores; they delivered lower price for (say) 64 cores worth of performance, by putting them all on the same chunk of silicon (edit: or at least in the same package). (There are some slight improvements in inter-processor interrupt and cache-forwarding latency, but if that's a performance bottleneck, the problem is bad parallelization at the code level.)