Obviously it would be sensible for the person doing the installation to have reasonable familiarity of the system they're installing on, but the 64-bit situation can be confusing even for fairly advanced users. As is explained if you dig deeper into the documentation (but not when asked to choose an installation guide) AMD originally created the 64-bit architecture that Intel and others eventually adopted and rebranded which is why it's referred to in Gentoo as AMD64. Intel i3-5-7 and Core 2 chips are very popular now and desktop users who know they're 64-bit may be confused as to whether they should go for x86 (fine but not optimised), IA64 (incorrect; server architecture) or AMD64 (the correct option, but with an Intel chip it's easy to dismiss something labelled "AMD"). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: n/a Expected Results: It would be useful to add a paragraph to the first documentation page explaining that users of 64-bit Intel chips should choose the AMD64 guide. Additionally, the "Choosing the right installation medium" section of the AMD64 guide (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?part=1&chap=2) mentions Core2 chips in the system requirements and could be updated to also mention Core i3/i5/i7.
We already have plenty of pages in the handbooks and in the FAQs that explain which media to use for which processors.
Fair enough. Most people I think start with page 1 rather than going through all the FAQs first, but worst case they'll pick x86 without thinking and end up with an unoptimised system, then later on think about rebuilding for 64-bit.
