If I bought this, I would use it as daily driver for productivity work plus some vintage gaming through emulation. So what would be very interesting on top of the everyday use element, is some emulation related tests. I would like to propose
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The use of qemu or better yet hqemu user mode emulation together with binfmt and chroot to see if simple x86 Linux games run well at all. This was actually demoed by Raptor on a Power8 system before in 2016 when they were still contemplating the Talos 1.
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If the above is workable then throw Wine on top of it and see how it does. Given the test done at Talospace on this topic, hqemu seems to emulate x86 at around 1/3 the speed? So letâs call it a 1ghz Pentium. So perhaps try games that date back to early 2000s?
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The above at the end is emulation so may not work well. But how about vintage gaming through open source emulators like RPCS3, Dolphin and MAME? I wonder if those will compile and work correctly. If they do then it still provides a decent source of old games for leisure.
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Away from emulation, I also wonder how well nVidia GPU works on this system. We know nVidia provides binary drivers for their Tesla cards to work on Power9 systems. I wonder if they would be nice enough to leave the codes in there so either GeForce or Quadro cards would work? The Tesla cards have no video output so âuselessâ as a display card.
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If #4 doesnât work, would a Tesla card combined with an AMD GPU work, through the Looking Glass project? Itâs a big ask though if you have a Tesla card lying around, it might be worth a shot?
Those are my wish list items. Really appreciate your insights here.
Thanks
Michael