technical question about intel

I can't help but wonder, I know that my money is all on AMD but I have a technical question. Now if The T-bird has 384K with 200MHz FSB, why does a lousy coppermine beat it clocked at the same clock speed? In the report about the 1.2G Thunderbird which beat the pricy 1Ghz, the p!!! got higher scores when both of them were clocked at the same clock rate. Now why is that? The Athlon Core is better and all of the other stuff, is it about the SSE vs. 3dnow!? Thank you in advance.

All depends on the test. If the program testing the cpu's doesn't support 3dnow, then the speed tests are kind of invalid.

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The P!!! has a shorter pipeline than the athlon, This means instructions take less clock cycles to finish executing on the P!!!.
The athlons long pipeline means that while it is theoretically possible to start several instructions per clock cycle, it often can't because the next instructions rely on the result of earlier ones - and the result is not yet available.

The athlon also has a crappy Branch Prediction Unit(BPU) while the P!!! has a good one. If a program is going to branch depending on the result of an earlier instruction, it is not known which way it will branch until that instruction has finish execution - 5 to 10 clock cycles. Instead of sitting doing nothing in that time, the CPU guesses which way it will go and starts executing. Obviously, if it guesses wrong it has to cancle all the instructions it's done and the time's wasted anyway. The BPU is responsible for making these guesses.
The next generation of Athlon is expected to have a better BPU.