Complete information concerning supported peripherals can be found at Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO. This section merely outlines the basics. Nearly all x86-based (IA-32) processors still in use in personal computers are supported, including all varieties of Intel's "Pentium" series. This also includes 32-bit AMD and VIA (former Cyrix) processors, and processors like the Athlon XP and Intel P4 Xeon. If your system has a 64-bit processor from the AMD64 or Intel EM64T families, you will probably want to use the installer for the amd64 architecture instead of the installer for the (32-bit) i386 architecture. However, Debian GNU/Linux &releasename; will not run on 386 or earlier processors. Despite the architecture name "i386", support for actual 80386 processors (and their clones) was dropped with the Sarge (r3.1) release of Debian We have long tried to avoid this, but in the end it was necessary due a unfortunate series of issues with the compiler and the kernel, starting with an bug in the C++ ABI provided by GCC. You should still be able to run Debian GNU/Linux on actual 80386 processors if you compile your own kernel and compile all packages from source, but that is beyond the scope of this manual. . (No version of Linux has ever supported the 286 or earlier chips in the series.) All i486 and later processors are still supported Many Debian packages will actually run slightly faster on modern computers as a positive side effect of dropping support for these old chips. The i486, introduced in 1989, has three opcodes (bswap, cmpxchg, and xadd) which the i386, introduced in 1986, did not have. Previously, these could not be easily used by most Debian packages; now they can. . The system bus is the part of the motherboard which allows the CPU to communicate with peripherals such as storage devices. Your computer must use the ISA, EISA, PCI, PCIe, or VESA Local Bus (VLB, sometimes called the VL bus). Essentially all personal computers sold in recent years use one of these.