Hi
I do frequent bakes with cloth simulations and such,
I am wondering about purchasing hardware to reduce the time required for this.
Soon AMD will be releasing the Zen5 9000 series,
Ryzen 9950X or Intel Core285K which is rumored to be released at the end of the year.
Which one will finish the simulation bake faster?
There is a difference of 8 cores between Intel and AMD. Will the number of cores make a difference in the simulation bake?
I don’t think it’s the same performance for all situations. 
There is a test scene in the video below.
But this video is old.
For hardware information, please wait for other people’s comments 
Ideally you need to do some benchmark tests on a few of your most likely varied simulation files.
What you need to be doing at the time is monitoring/logging what the system is doing (using something like HWInfo). And see what the CPU/GPU is doing. How many cores are being used, maybe how much the memory is being hit to see if faster/slower RAM makes a different or just the amount (may need to look into specific tools for this).
Then once you know what sort of resources the process uses the most, you can better research what should run it faster.