Determining CPU/Processor Architecture

One page summary to find your machine's CPU/Processor architecture.

Why does processor architecture matter?

Misfuelling a car or lorry can cause severe damage to the engine. The damage occurs because diesel engines aren’t designed to run on petrol, and neither are petrol engines designed to run on diesel. Similarly, the “engine” of your computer, its processor, can only execute software that has been specifically compiled/written for it.

You might often find several versions available for your operating system when downloading software. Downloading software written for a different processor architecture won’t cause any harm to your machine, but you’ll end up losing time for downloading and trying to install it.

Thankfully, it’s possible to find processor architecture on all operating systems before installing packages. Here’s how:

Verifying processor architecture on Windows

  • Click Start, type System and click on System in the Control Panel list,
  • Go to the About section and find the System Type under Device Specifications.

Verifying processor architecture on Linux

  • Open a Terminal or Console,
  • Type uname -i and press Enter.

Verifying processor architecture on Mac

  • Press the Command key and Space bar at the same time,
  • Type Terminal and press Enter,
  • Type uname -m in the prompt and press Enter.

Read further

Just like car manufacturers design different engines, computers can have different processors.

ISAs (Instruction Set Architecture) are abstract models of computers, often called computer/CPU/processor architectures. ISAs define what machine language developers need to know to program a computer.

There most common CPU Architectures/ISAs are:

  • x86
  • x86_64
  • arm32
  • arm64

We usually group ISAs by their architectural complexity:

  • CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) has many specialized instructions, some of which may be used rarely,
  • RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) implements instructions that are commonly used and treats the rest as subroutines.

x86/x86_64 are CISCs, and arm32/arm64 are RISCs. Arm processors are compact and energy-saving, favouring their use in energy-saving devices like mobiles, tablets, and IoT devices. x86 processors are high-performance chipsets and are primarily used in servers, desktops, notebooks and laptops where performance is required.

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