Hi guys, this might seem to be an odd question ( or maybe even a stupid one) but I just need to be sure, will there be any difference in terms of quality/size, when I encode the same CD track on let's say on a very low end machine like maybe a Cyrix 100 vs. let's say a Pentium Xeon?
No. As long as you use the same software to encode of course.
If encoder is optimized for using multimedia extensions like MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc. and you'll use it on a CPU which doesn't support them, it can use native FPU operations for encoding. So, there may be some differences in resulting data, slower encoding speed, and few bytes smaller/bigger size, but they shouldn't affect quality.