IMHO (and even though I run Intel these days due to the unquestionable price/performance and pure performance advantages I'm still an AMD fanboy at heart) HT is not superior to Intels FSB.
HT is at best a 16 bit link @ 1GHz full duplex (this is NOT 2GHz if anything it could be said to be 32 bits wide, but thats still incorrect as it is 16 bits in each direction, therefore it is 16bit 1GHz full duplex). Intels FSB is 64bits wide last I checked, and clocked at a similar 1.066GHz although this is half duplex I believe, it is often run at 1.6GHz and above in over clocked situations, and is of course 4x as wide.
HT has a much lower bandwidth than Intels FSB.
The advantage comes not from HT over FSB, but from the fact that much lower demands are placed on HT due to the fact that CPU->RAM access does not require anything to cross the HT link, and in multiple CPU configs the fact that there are multiple HT links.
This is a similar advantage to the one Pentium Pro had all those years ago by being able to directly access its L2 cache without FSB loading over Pentium MMX which used motherboard based L2 cache.
Add an IMC to C2D however, and use Dual Independent FSBs in Dual CPU systems, and the "Advantage" of HT evaporates. If HT were to be used without an IMC it would choke and bottleneck the whole system.
AMD has a platform advantage with the HT/IMC/Multiple pathing system it runs, but for marketing purposes it seems to try to attribute this all to Hypertransport, because, well, Its HYPER!!! and this is all us stupid consumers can understand: Buzzwords.
As for P3 (or is that P!!! ?) I agree it was far superior to Netburst. It always seemed to me that the reason for Netburst was simple: Intel took a massive publicity hit from the Athlon hitting 1GHz before the P3. Intel took a bigger one by pushing out very dodgy and unstable-without-the-right-microcode P3s that were clocked higher than they should have been and almost unavailable anyway just so that they could say they were matching Athlon in clock speeds around the 1.33GHz mark.
Its almost as if, some important guy at Intel who had no idea about how CPUs actually work said to the engineers "If AMD ever beat us in clock speeds again you are all fired" and forced the engineers to come out with the clockspeed-at-any-cost Netburst mArch. Its like they let the marketing department build their dream easy-to-sell chip without regard for anything (even performance). I really will never understand why they did it tbh.
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