I did a little more digging on this subject, and findings are a bit dubious: as
required to disclose by Intel, their claims are based on a
study commissioned by Intel from IOActive. The study itself does not describe in any kind of detail the steps they took to prove the AMD system is unprotected from malware, but it does describe the technologies they believe give Intel the competitive advantage in security.
The main feature is considered to be Threat Detection Technology (TDT), which based on
another article from ArsTechnica enables antivirus software to scan memory contents using GPU acceleration and also helps heuristic algorithms detect suspicious behavior based on system telemetry data. Both features are nice and all,
but they are 100% bound to the performance of the active antivirus software.
Based on the data I have so far, I'm tempted to think that what Intel demoed in their CES presentation was the effectiveness of Windows Defender running on two different systems, one of which had a different build of Defender.