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I consider myself a well versed user and just found out recently that my Core 2 Duo laptop (which I bought in 2007) supports amd64. Have been running i386 all the while, and have even explicitly downloaded the x86 version of Fedora when they presented me the x64 download by default...

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I have a Core 2 Duo laptop from 2007-2008 and yes, runs x86_64 perfectly.

Intel chips have supported it pretty soon after AMD, since the latter-day Pentium 4s (from 2004 on).

Not true -- the original Core series was x86-only, with x64 coming in the Core 2 line.

No, it's quite true. Some of the Prescott model Pentium 4's released in '05 supported x64, but the Yonah Core processors released in '06 didn't. That's mostly because Yonah was only intended to be a mobile chip. When it ended up being better in many ways than the Pentium 4 Intel quickly released the 64-bit Core 2 as a successor to both.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

If there's a 'lm' in flags, it works in 64-bit mode

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