dumb AMD question

I'm thinking of buying a new PC that will eventually run either RHEL
4WS or Fedora Core 6. This machine (Dell Dimension) will most likely
have an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor. Now for the dumb question....
I've never owned/used a machine with an AMD processor. I assume that
the regular AMD chips were just x86 and ran the same software that an
Intel x86 machine would run, what about the AMD Athlon 64? AMD claims
it can run both 32 and 64 bit software. Would this allow me to still
install 32-bit RHEL or Fedora? If I feel like trying out 64-bit would
I install the x84_64 packages (or are those Intel only?). I reealize
(or assume) that if I'm going to install x86_64 software packages, I'll
have had to install the x86_64 OS, that correct? And finally, if I
install the x86_64 OS, can I still install the regular 32-bin (x86
packages?), or am I forced to now only install the 64-bin packages?
Thanks in advance..

.

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