Ever find yourself having to lookup up which CPU chipset you have installed on your PC? Forget?…too tired to take apart your PC?…or simply threw away the box? There’s a great little program called “cpuid” which divulges information about the guts of your CPU.

I find myself having to look up receipts on Newegg from time-to-time in order to ascertain which driver my hardware requires, especially with Linux-based operating systems, where a handy Windows Installation CD is useless.

With Gentoo Linux, there are many build flags that are available to you as well as Kernel config settings (w/all Linux distros) that can take advantage of your specific hardware.

Once installed, you’ll find a wealth of information as in this sample output of a few relavant lines from ‘cpuid’:

$ cpuid

CPU:
   vendor_id = "AuthenticAMD"
   version information (1/eax):
      processor type  = primary processor (0)
      family          = Intel Pentium 4/Pentium D/Pentium Extreme Edition/Celeron/Xeon/Xeon MP/Itanium2, AMD Athlon 64/Athlon XP-M/Opteron/Sempron/Turion (15)
      model           = 0xc (12)
      stepping id     = 0x0 (0)
      extended family = 0x0 (0)
      extended model  = 0x1 (1)
      (simple synth)  = AMD Athlon 64 (Winchester DH8-D0) / Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0) / mobile Athlon 64 (Oakville DH8-D0) / mobile Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0) / mobile Athlon XP-M (Winchester DH8-D0), 754-pin, 90nm
...
   extended processor signature (0x80000001/eax):
      generation     = AMD Athlon 64/Opteron/Sempron/Turion (15)
      model          = 0xc (12)
      stepping       = 0x0 (0)
      (simple synth) = AMD Athlon 64 (Winchester DH8-D0) / Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0) / mobile Athlon 64 (Oakville DH8-D0) / mobile Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0) / mobile Athlon XP-M (Winchester DH8-D0), 754-pin, 90nm
   extended feature flags (0x80000001/edx):
...
   brand = "AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3000+"
...
  (multi-processing synth): none
  (synth) = AMD Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0), 754-pin, 90nm Processor 3000+

As of this writing, ‘cpuid’ has yet to become an official ebuild, but you can download the test ebuild script and follow the Gentoo-specific instructions instructions for using local portage ebuilds that have are still in the testing phase.

Here are the simpler installation procedures via apt-get for Debian-based systems:

$ apt-get install cpuid

Coming soon: Instructions for installing 3rd party ebuild scripts on Gentoo.