egrep "^model name|^flags" /proc/cpuinfo model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov
I'm not sure enforcing sse3 or later for AMD64 hardware is the best course of action. pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good nopl eagerfpu pni lahf_lm 3dnowprefetch vmmcall This machine is still able to run Arch just fine, and has saved the day when the laptop I used day to day broke down. As others have said, AMD cpus might not have sse4 unless they are quite recent. Requiring sse2 might be a reasonable cutoff, but I'm sure there will be people still using older machines that will complain if sse2 is mandatory, as I can reasonably see late pentium 3 machines still being usable for office, email or light browsing applications. -- Mauro Santos