Switch to an ARM or PPC chip, and it's a completely different process. Yup. That's why you should do it for learning purposes - getting your head around how

Switch to an ARM or PPC chip, and it's a completely different process. Yup. That's why you should do it for learning purposes - getting your head around how a machine bootstraps itself is, to my mind, one of the harder things to understand about a computing system. Part of that is because someone who doesn't know how it works might look at booting mechanisms as a sort of "black box", or just magic. Once you peer into the black box and understand some of it, suddenly, none of it seems all that mysterious anymore, even if you've only learned the particulars for one specific machine.