Why does the 64bit Linux Mint Live run on my 32bit machine?

Just made my Live-USB from 64bit Mint 21.3 (https://www.linuxmint.com/torrents/linuxmint-21.3-xfce-64bit.iso.torrent) and plugged into my old 32bit laptop, forgetting it still is such old. (Probably it's not relevant, but in any case: I created the USB stick basically following the answer at https://askubuntu.com/a/1227225/602021) Everything boots and runs fine, new software comes from amd64 repository, is installable and runs also. How can that be, given that it is software for another architecture? **EDIT:** Laptop chipset & model: $ lscpu Architecture: i686 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Address sizes: 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 2 On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1 Vendor ID: GenuineIntel Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T6600 @ 2.20GHz CPU family: 6 Model: 23 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 Stepping: 10 CPU(s) scaling MHz: 66% CPU max MHz: 2200,0000 CPU min MHz: 1200,0000 BogoMIPS: 4388,93 Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts cpuid aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est $ sudo dmidecode | grep -A3 '^System Information' System Information Manufacturer: Acer Product Name: Extensa 5220 Version: 0100