Buehl, Reiner (HPS EMEA, DO-C&I) wrote: > To be more precice: If it says you have an INTEL cpu - no matter how many > cores you have or if your cpu is 32 or 64 bits, using an AMD optimized kernel > is a bad idea! It will work but you will end up with a slower system then you > have now. Let me help clear up some confusion. The "amd64" is an instruction set architecture not a cpu. Both AMD and Intel produce cpus using that instruction set. An Athlon x2 is an AMD processor that implements the amd64 instruction set. An Intel Core 2 Duo cpu also implements the amd64 instruction set. It is perfectly okay to run an amd64 64-bit system on a 64-bit Intel processor. You can even run an amd64 architecture compiled optimized for an Intel Core 2 Duo cpu. It would still be amd64 machine code. This isn't to confuse the amd64 architecture with the ia64 architecture. The ia64 architecture is quite different from the amd64 architecture and are not compatible. These names often lead to confusion among people who try to boot ia64 software on an amd64 system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amd64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64 However for a desktop there are still a small set of important applications which appear to be only available as 32-bit binary blobs and therefore a 32-bit system is a good recommendation unless you have specific needs. Personally I run a 64-bit desktop with everything but a few 32-bit applications running inside a 32-bit chroot. It is more complicated but also more flexible. This process is documented here: http://alioth.debian.org/docman/view.php/30192/21/debian-amd64-howto.html#id292205 Bob
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