On 19/02/07, Klaus Steden <klaus.steden@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Newbie-ish question... what exactly is the difference between i686 and > x86_64? I imagine athlon is specifically for AMD 64-bit processors? > One short answer is that a 32-bit CPU (i386 - Pentium, Athlon, etc.) uses 32-bit addressing, while a 64-bit CPU (x86_64 - Opteron, Itanium, etc.) uses 64-bit addressing -- meaning your OS and applications can address more than 4 GB of memory at one time.
I know that much... my question was specifically about x86_64 and i686 (since I was under the impression that i686 also means a 64-bit processor). I imagine i686 covers a much wider range of CPUs, not all of which are 64-bit? Binand
