In my Purism I have an Intel® Core™ i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz × 4
but when I call uname -a I get an “amd”-Kernel:
4.19.0-9-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.118-2+deb10u1 (2020-06-07) x86_64 GNU/Linux
Is this a good combination? I was expecting a kernel for Intel processors?
I think the “amd64” here is simply the old name for the x86_64 architecture (which AMD initially came up with and the same architecture both AMD and Intel have been using). I don’t think there are kernels specifically optimized for either Intel or AMD processors.
i think there was one optimized for intel but i’d rather not say here since it’s a heavily modified distribution that is massaged by intel devs themselves …
Sure, it’s possible! If you really want a kernel optimized for your system the most straightforward way is to build it from source, and pass gcc flags like -march=native -mtune=native to optimize for the specific CPU and generation. But I do not think this is worth your time on modern systems, CPU time spent in the kernel tends to be a small fraction. And some performance critical things such as cryptographic hashing already have multi-CPU implementations by default that are switched at run time.