Is Mandriva compatible with the AMD Sempron ?
 

Ive been trying to get the latest version of Mandrake/Mandriva but my latest computer is running on an AMD Sempron at approximately 2ghz. Is there a distro of Mandriva that will work with my CPU ?

All ive seen on the mirrors and FTPs is an x86-64 which Im sure is not my architecture type and an i586 which if I understand it correctly is the technical name for the Intel Pentium. Does i586 on a mandriva distro mean its compatible with any x86 architecture or intel compatible CPU's ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry is this has been asked before but I didnt see any threads about it in the first page of this particular forum.

It should work fine on the Semperons, but you'd need the i586 and higher packages, not the x86-64, as these are for the newer 64-bit processors. Generally whenever you see other distros, you'll be looking at i386, i586 or i686, all of which would work for you. You just get slightly different performance depending on what you run. Mandriva is pretty good to start out with though - very user friendly, good hardware detection, and good security + stability so give it a go.

Thanks fouldsy. The performance you were talking about has to do with the kernel giving instructions based on the type of processor architecture ? So if I had an i586 compatible but the core linux only handled i386 that would make a slower performance right ?

Wrong. Mandriva is already optimized to run on i586 architecture.
To give you an idea : debian is 'for' i386, slackware 'for' i486, mandiva 'for' i586
Arch 'for' i686. Notice the quotes : performance is not reduced whatever the
distro being 'optimized' for. Slack may well be the fastest but Debian is pretty fast.
The only thing to take care of is the different kind of processor, Cirix, processor for mac,
and 64-bit architecture. All the distros support intel processors and even AMD ones.
The difference is with the programs you run, not the processors.

regards