If a .whl is available online, pip always installs it rather than compiling from source. However, for some specific module, the wheel happened to be compiled for the next processor generation and doesn't run on a specific machine.
If I command it to just download the package, then it still downloads the wheel rather than source. Does pip have some mechanism to override this preference?
Use the --no-binary option.
pip install <package> --no-binary <package>