Quote:
Originally Posted by baronobeefdip
so the most common machine will be i386 therefore it should be the one to download
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If it is a new machine, the
only common CPU type is the type that will work with AMD64 and will also work with i386.
If you really don't want to even figure out whether you have a new CPU or an old CPU then you are correct to just download the i386 version.
If you have a cpu that will work with i386 but also will work with AMD64, you
might want to figure out which will work better.
If you have a really tiny amount of ram (512MB might be tiny these days, less than 512MB is tiny) or you have a really tiny amount of hard disk, then i386 will work better than AMD64.
If you have a really large amount of ram (16GB is really large, 8GB might be really large) or you run certain kinds of massive computation (maybe re encoding video files) the AMD64 will work better (assuming a CPU new enough for AMD64 to work at all).
For the big majority in between, it is almost impossible to predict which of i386 or AMD64 will work better and whichever of them works better won't work much better.