Linux

With one of these Altra CPUs (Q64-22), I can compile the Linux kernel (defconfig aarch64 with modules on GCC 15.1) in 3m8s with -j64. Really great for compiling, and much lower power draw than any x86 system with a comparable core count. Idles at 68W full system power, pulls 130W when all cores are under full load. Pulling out some of my 4 RAM sticks can drive that down a lot more than you'd expect for just RAM. lm_sensors claims the "CPU Power" is 16W and 56W in those two situations.

Should be awful for gaming. It's possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread) suffers a lot. I run a few containers where the performance hit really doesn't matter through qemu.

Ampere has a weird PCIe bug that results in either outright incompatibility or a video output filled with strange artifacts/distortion for the vast majority of GPUs, with the known good selection that aren't bugged being only a few select Nvidia ones. I don't happen to have any of those Nvidia cards but this workstation includes one. Other non-GPU PCIe things like NICs, NVMe, and SAS storage controllers work great, with tons of PCIe lanes.

It should be able to run games that support ARM. That means you are pretty much limited to open source games. The CPU clock speed is fairly low, so don't expect great performance. These systems are intended for heavily multithreaded workloads.

The Ampre Altra runs from 32 to 128 cores (dear gods that's beautiful), but with that architecture, and the company's stated purpose, it makes more sense in a computer meant to be used as a server rather than a desktop gaming rig. You'd use a chip like that in a Kubernetes cluster for example.

Combined with an Nvidia card, a brand notorious for being a Pain In The Ass in Linuxland, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the intended purpose of a box like this is a server for AI/ML-based services.

Arm processor, an nVidia graphics card, and Ubuntu? Err, doesn't sound great.

I think Jeff Geerling made a video trying to game on a similar arm system with mixed results. I'm sure it would work, since you can game on a Raspberry Pi using Box86/64, just probably not too well for the money

Love it. Want it (but not to game)

Proton for ARM is not (currently) a thing, if that's a factor

If I paid so much money it better game the shit out of games. But I honestly doubt ARM can with the overhead of emulation. And they don't even specify what kind of nvidia graphics it has. This tells me that the system isn't really meant to be used for gaming.

Actually, with the work done on box86/box64, you might be able to get stuff running well - last I heard, they got triple A games running around 45 FPS on Asahi on Apple M1.

However, it would be totally unsupported, and who knows how well the Apple M series optimizations will work on another member of the ARM family. (Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been tried on Ampere at least once.)

Really, the biggest issue is probably power usage - I don’t know if it’s enough to increase your power bill significantly, but it would definitely consume more power than say, an i7. This is due to Altra CPUs really being more for server usage - performance per watt will likely be better overall for those kinds of workloads, but you’re probably not going to make full use of the hardware. These systems are really more of server dev kits than daily drivers.

For a desktop, I’d just recommend a PC with a high end consumer grade CPU like an i7 or Ryzen 7.

@Ace120C , well, after a super brief search, it seems like it can run Steam and thus game technically. However, the performance costs of stacking "emulation" on top of each other seems rather burdensome. If you're running a Windows game on Proton, you have those call Windows-Linux conversions stacked on top of the x86_64-ARM call conversions. I can only speculate, maybe it's not as big of a thing as I imagine it being.