You don't ``need'' amd64, i386 will work just fine.
In short, the main advantages of amd64 over i386 is the possibility to use more than 3GB of memory[1] and better ZFS performance. The main disadvantages are that some systems don't work very well with amd64[2] and that some application won't work on amd64 (i.e. wine).
1: You can also use PAE with i386, it something of a dirty hack though.
2: I have two mainboards that work fine with i386 but give calcru: runtime went backwards problems with amd64, see this thread.
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