How To Confirm if Your CPU is 32bit or 64bit

Obtaining CPU information from /proc/cpuinfo

Most Linux distros will have the special /proc/cpuinfo file which contains a textual description of all the features your processors have. This is a very useful file – depending on your task it may help you identify any features of your processors, as well as confirm the overall number of CPUs your system has installed.

Most commonly, the following information is obtained from /proc/cpuinfo:

* processor model name and type
* processor speed in Mhz
* processor cache size
* instruction flags supported by CPU

Here's how the typical output will look:

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 4
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 3192.320
cache size : 2048 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts
acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
bogomips : 6388.78
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 128
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:The same block of information will be shown for each CPU visible to your system. There will be 2 processor instances for each physical CPU if hyper-treading is enabled, and there will be 2 or 4 processor entries for each physical CPU on dual- and quad-core systems configurations.
How to confirm the 64bit capability of your CPU in Linux

Based on /proc/cpuinfo file, it is quite easy to confirm whether your CPU is capable of 64bit or not. All you have to do is look at the flags which tell you what instruction sets your CPU is capable of.

All the CPUs on your system will have the same type and therefore support the same instruction sets, that's why in this example the grep command returns 4 similar lines – for the 4 CPU instances found on my system: