It's a few things; mostly along the lines of data caching (i.e. hyper threading may mean that other thread needs a cache sync/barrier/etc).

That said I'll point to the Intel Atom - the first version and refresh were an 'in-order' where hyper-threading was the cheapest option (both silicon and power-wise) to provide performance, however with Silvermont they switched to OOO execution but ditched hyper threading.

Yeah of you are running Comsol you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth.

Gaming CPUs and some EPYCs are the best